Recovering deleted NTFS: Backup BS or Rebuild BS?
Posted: 11 Jun 2020, 15:08
While trying to cleanup old Windows-related partitions, I accidentally deleted a partition that held all my backed up data. 
On a HDD with 2 partitions I:
1. deleted 100mb partition leftover from previous Windows installation
2. expanded the main partition to encompass that 100mb partition
3. accidentally deleted the main partition
TestDisk found all the partitions after a deep search, but I'm only concerned with recovering the largest partition. I set the partition to Primary and TestDisk now sees it on subsequent TestDisk executions, but to make it accessible to Windows, I need to recover the boot sector. Here, I am confronted with a prompt that I am too ignorant to proceed through:
Should I Backup, Rebuild, or Dump?
On a HDD with 2 partitions I:
1. deleted 100mb partition leftover from previous Windows installation
2. expanded the main partition to encompass that 100mb partition
3. accidentally deleted the main partition
TestDisk found all the partitions after a deep search, but I'm only concerned with recovering the largest partition. I set the partition to Primary and TestDisk now sees it on subsequent TestDisk executions, but to make it accessible to Windows, I need to recover the boot sector. Here, I am confronted with a prompt that I am too ignorant to proceed through:
Code: Select all
Disk /dev/sda - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121601 255 63
Partition Start End Size in sectors
1 P HPFS - NTFS 12 223 20 121600 247 55 1953312768
Previous
Error: size boot_sector 1953515520 > partition 1953312768
Status: Bad
Backup boot sector
Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 224 (NTFS) != 255 (HD)
Warning: number of sectors per track mismatches 19 (NTFS) != 63 (HD)
Status: OK
Sectors are not identical.
A valid NTFS Boot sector must be present in order to access
any data; even if the partition is not bootable.