I have the following problem with my USB stick: 5 days ago I reconnected my USB stick, which I usually use, to the PC. Suddenly I got the message that I should format the USB stick. Of course I didn't do this at first.
When I checked Disk Management, it showed my USB stick as "RAW" and that it had 100% free space. After some research, I read a bit about it and tried the "Testdisk" program to see if it could find my partitions.
Nothing was found under PC/Intel using "quick search and deep search". Under the category "none" and "advanced" I was shown something that you can see in my file attachment.
I'll copy the log from the search here (somehow it didn't include the deep search in the log? And in general it looks kind of "empty" to me, as if it hadn't really searched at all):
Fri Apr 29 23:00:30 2022
Command line: TestDisk
TestDisk 7.2-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, March 2022
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
https://www.cgsecurity.org
OS: Windows 8 (9200)
Compiler: GCC 11.2, Cygwin 3001.4
ext2fs lib: 1.45.3, ntfs lib: 10:0:0, reiserfs lib: none, ewf lib: 20140608, curses lib: ncurses 6.1
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\PhysicalDrive0)=1000204886016
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\PhysicalDrive1)=500107862016
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\PhysicalDrive2)=31037849600
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\C:)=499461914624
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\D:)=1000186314752
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\G:)=31037849600
Hard disk list
Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive0 - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121601 255 63, sector size=512 - Samsung SSD 870 QVO 1TB, S/N:S5RRNF0R671535D, FW:SVQ02B6Q
Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive1 - 500 GB / 465 GiB - CHS 60801 255 63, sector size=512 - Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB, S/N:S2RBNX0JC66095E, FW:EMT02B6Q
Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive2 - 31 GB / 28 GiB - CHS 3773 255 63, sector size=512 - Generic Flash Disk, S/N:22101051700061, FW:8.01
Partition table type defaults to Intel
Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive2 - 31 GB / 28 GiB - Generic Flash Disk
Partition table type: Intel
Interface Advanced
New options :
Dump : No
Align partition: Yes
Expert mode : No
The whole search took about 18 hours (quick and deep) I used windows 10 for this What else I've tried (which apparently isn't that smart if you don't have a clone): I searched for my files using the EaseUS Data Recovery program. The program found my files but couldn't recover them properly.
Only several "ÿ" characters were visible in the .txt files. After that I tried your other program "EaseUS Partition Recovery". This program showed me that there is a lost partition and also showed it to me as "High" with the probability of recovering it. But since you have to pay for it and I'm not sure about such things, I didn't do that for the time being.
Since I only read about the "cloning" late, I also tried starting it via the HDDSuperclone live cd. The problem was that it would have taken a very long time and I'm not sure if it would have copied over all the corrupted stuff. For me it had a write speed of 125 kb/s. That sounds like very little to me. The whole thing would probably have taken 2-3 days or more. Is this normal?
I also heard about the program "Photorec". Should I try that again? Before I take any further steps, I'd rather ask here instead of damaging anything more.