I accidentally re-formatted my hard drive and I'm trying to restore my files. I stupidly used the wrong hard drive and formatted it to a Panasonic DVR (might use a type of Linux file system from my research). But don’t blame me, physical hard drive looked exactly the same. I hope this didn’t erase any data, apparently formatting a hard drive doesn’t permanently delete any data (as it’s still on the raw drive), it just changes the partition table.
I opened ‘TestDisk’ to restore my files. You’re supposed to choose a type, none of which have NTFS listed. So the closest was Intel/PC partition. I scanned that, and it didn’t come up with any partition/s. So I opened loads of ‘TestDisk’ command prompts, and let it scan all the types. I get a result from the ‘non-partitioned media’ prompt. How ironic, if you load up ‘select the partition table type’ dialog, you always get a note at the bottom of the screen: Do NOT select 'None' for media with only a single partition, It's very rare for a disk to be 'Non-partitioned'. Also, why would TestDisk detect non-partitioned if I was using at least one NTFS partition? Does it detect non-partitioned if the drive is re-formatted?
Anyway, I end up making a partition image, then running ‘testdisk image.dd’ to load up the image. Half the time and I couldn’t work out why command prompt said ‘testdisk is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.’ But you have to add it to system environment variables aka ‘PATH’.
After finding an alternative loading method, I set the type to NTFS (tell me if that’s wrong, because…) the first boot sector doesn’t work, back-up one does. And I doubt it was exFAT because both boot sectors don’t work. There’s an option to replace the main boot sector with the backup one, but subsequently this just resulted in my image.dd file being corrupted as it gave the error ‘can’t read, file system appears to be damaged’. Har har nice one TestDisk. Why would that even work. But I’m joking, it still can’t read it even because first boot sector doesn’t work, and I’m stuck at that. Is there any chance I can fix that and if I can open the files, will they be completely intact with file-names and directories? I thought TestDisk could fix that as it restores partitions as a whole. I was kind of relying on this method to work.
So my last alternative was ‘PhotoRec’. It doesn’t restore file-names or directories. Also I have unique file types that PhotoRec can’t recover. From my research it only uses signature scanning, and can only recover certain file types, whereas other paid recovery software like RecoverIt by Wondershare has a higher success rate as it can restore more file-types.
Most of my data was backed up but I probably deleted/lost 1 years worth of photos (+ more data), at least for the most part messed up/partially unrecoverable and I’m disappointed I can’t restore everything exactly the way it was. It only took a silly, accidental 1-minute re-format for everything to mess up. This is really devastating to me, please help describe what are my other options, if my drive is fully recoverable or not, for peace of mind. Yes I didn’t dump new files onto the reformatted hard drive in case of overwritten files, I’m aware of that. I’ve been so stressed about this and haven’t been coping well, please help
