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rasarx wrote: 17 Feb 2020, 09:49 That's what I'm afraid of. It seems odd though, that a quick format would do that. Isn't that what a full format would do? Is it possible that quick format acts differently on an SSD?

Yes, I did use -a. I still have the command in the history:

C:\Program Files\smartmontools\bin> smartctl -a /dev/sdb >c:\temp\myreport.txt

C:\Program Files\smartmontools\bin> c:\temp\myreport.txt

I am a bit confused about the outcome of the report because I remember having seen the parameter list with "pending sectors", "reallocated sector count" and other when running smartmontools on a SSD of mine. Those parameters are missing in your case.

What is your file system on the formatted drive?
What did you do for a quick format and under which operating system did you trigger a quick format?

The format now is NTFS. It was NTFS before the quick format as well.
The system is Windows 10.
The way the quick format happened was I externally attached a new drive. As expected Windows popped up a "disk needs to be formatted" message. I pressed OK, and it popped up the message again, and I pressed OK again, which was puzzling at that time. At that moment it didn't occur to me the first one was quick formatting my existing SSD drive. I have thought about what may have caused the system to do that. The system has two internal drives (the OS one and the auxiliary, SSD one where the data lives). It didn't ask to format the OS one. I suppose it is possible that by some cosmic coincidence at the very moment I plugged in the external drive the SSD drive could have failed, making it think it needed to be reformatted, which I unwittingly said OK to. But what are the odds of that?

With those details given, I have no possible explanation.

Thanks for your feedback. Any thoughts on why TestDisk thinks the drive size is twice what it is?

"TestDisk 7.2-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, January 2020
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
https://www.cgsecurity.org
Disk /dev/sdb - 512 GB / 476 GiB - CHS 62260 255 63
The harddisk (512 GB / 476 GiB) seems too small! (< 1024 GB / 953 GiB)
Check the harddisk size: HD jumper settings, BIOS detection...
The following partition can't be recovered:
Partition Start End Size in sectors
> MS Data 1000214527 2000164862 999950336
[ Continue ]
NTFS, blocksize=4096, 511 GB / 476 GiB

The CHS-parameters suggest that the drive is one 1TB big, assuming a sector size of 512 Byte.

I wonder how that information is coming back.

The drive is toshiba kxg50znv512g. Those are 512 GB devices (the 512g is even part of the model name).
https://www.memory4less.com/toshiba-xg5 ... g50znv512g

Testdisk is questioning the disk.

Any suggestions how to deal with that?

No.
It doesn't matter anyway if your sectors are zeroed.

I appreciate all the help you have provided.