HFS Partition looks recovered, but empty?

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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sekmo
Posts: 2
Joined: 04 Apr 2020, 10:51

HFS Partition looks recovered, but empty?

#1 Post by sekmo »

Classic case: formatted the wrong hard disk (2TB WD elements) from Windows. It had 1 HFS partition - Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

It looks like I was able to use testdisk to recover the partition table: I got back the same volume name, so I was super happy.. But sadly I opened the volume and it's empty :(

I noticed from right-clicking and clicking "get info" that I get "Capacity: 2TB, Available: 2 TB (144 KB purgeable)"

1) Why was possible to recover just the name and not the files? :(
2) What does tre message "144 KB purgeable" mean?
3) I was reading that some people had to change the block size from 512 to 4096 when using 2TB hard drives, should I do it?
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cgrenier
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Re: HFS Partition looks recovered, but empty?

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Try PhotoRec to recover your data. It will not recover the original filenames.
The default blocksize should be OK. Do not alter the sectorsize (512 versus 4096 bytes).
Store the recovered files on another disk, otherwise you will overwrite your lost data with the data you are recovering.
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sekmo
Posts: 2
Joined: 04 Apr 2020, 10:51

Re: HFS Partition looks recovered, but empty?

#3 Post by sekmo »

Thank you for the info, but unluckily the actual data here was the structure of the folders/files in the hard drive, so recovering single files won’t help much in this case...

Just for me to understand: why I am able to see only the volume name but not the files?
Can it be because I made too many attempts and rewrote the partition table multiple times? I would like to understand a bit more if something :-)
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