Wrote recovered partition to disk - now what?

[Hashim]

A while back I accidentally ran:

Code: Select all

diskpart
format override /fs=ntfs

..on the wrong drive, which turned out to be my 2TB external data drive. The command ran for less than a minute before I realised what I'd done and cancelled it.

After a renewed motivation to recover it over the last few days, I managed to compile Testdisk for Cygwin and then used it to find my partition successfully, after which I marked it as Primary instead of bootable because I'm assuming that a data drive does not need to be bootable. However, even after I write the partition to the disk and restart my computer as prompted, the disk appears to behave the same way - it shows up as RAW in Windows' disk management, and Windows keeps prompting that it needs to be formatted. What's going on here? Am I missing any steps to make my data drive's filesystem start showing up again in Windows Explorer?

Thank you in advance, I would really appreciate some help as this drive contains many years of irreplaceable sentimental data and it would mean a lot to get them back.

[recuperation]

Finding a partition and adding it to the partition table is not enough for a successful recovery.
You forgot to use the p command to list files on the NTFS drive.
That gives you an indication if the file system structures have been damaged or not.

The log file as well contains valuable information indicating the amount of dammage existing.

There is still Photorec as last line of defense against a possible data loss.

[Hashim]

Finding a partition and adding it to the partition table is not enough for a successful recovery.
You forgot to use the p command to list files on the NTFS drive.
That gives you an indication if the file system structures have been damaged or not.

The log file as well contains valuable information indicating the amount of dammage existing.

There is still Photorec as last line of defense against a possible data loss.

Is this part necessary? The Step by Step guide seems to imply to me that it is optional, and that if the partition has been recovered it can be written to the disk. Are there usually no other steps after writing the new partition table to the disk and restarting?

[recuperation]

Finding a partition and adding it to the partition table is not enough for a successful recovery.
You forgot to use the p command to list files on the NTFS drive.
That gives you an indication if the file system structures have been damaged or not.

The log file as well contains valuable information indicating the amount of dammage existing.

There is still Photorec as last line of defense against a possible data loss.

Is this part necessary? The Step by Step guide seems to imply to me that it is optional, and that if the partition has been recovered it can be written to the disk. Are there usually no other steps after writing the new partition table to the disk and restarting?

If you don't mind having invalid or "RAW" partitions in your partition table, no.
You could run checkdisk if you want to.

[Hashim]

Finding a partition and adding it to the partition table is not enough for a successful recovery.
You forgot to use the p command to list files on the NTFS drive.
That gives you an indication if the file system structures have been damaged or not.

The log file as well contains valuable information indicating the amount of dammage existing.

There is still Photorec as last line of defense against a possible data loss.

Is this part necessary? The Step by Step guide seems to imply to me that it is optional, and that if the partition has been recovered it can be written to the disk. Are there usually no other steps after writing the new partition table to the disk and restarting?

If you don't mind having invalid or "RAW" partitions in your partition table, no.
You could run checkdisk if you want to.

So for a data drive, should I expect that if everything went right the drive should show up in Windows Explorer after rebooting?

[recuperation]

So for a data drive, should I expect that if everything went right the drive should show up in Windows Explorer after rebooting?

No. You should not expect anything unless you have checked the accessibility of its content with the p-key before.
I don't understand what "everything went right" means.