cgsecurity.org

I lend my uncle my 600GB Transcend hard drive (FAT32) to take it to my aunt's house, he calls me one day saying that the hard drive doesn't want to work and after about 4 months he comes back to me to check the drive and I discover that it is in a RAW format, so I started following tutorials on how to recover the files. I used a recovery
software (Easy Recovery) but at the last moment I realized that it was paid and changed to EaseUs Recovery Wizard, which only recovers 80GB of the 400GB I had in use. I used Testdisk and it is not able to find partitions. I realized that before starting the scan this
appears:

Partition Start End Size in Sectors

Invalid FAT boot sector
1* FAT16 >32M 0 32 33 77825 37 36 1250258944
1* FAT16>32M 0 32 33 77825 37 36 1250258944

I searched in google and in the official testdisk page it said that with "RebuildBS" everything would be solved but it wasn't able to find a FAT either and after analyzing the cluster it gave me the option to list the files but when I press enter it said "No filesystem found. Filesystem may be damaged". Please help, the files I had were very important for me and I don't know what to do anymore.

Dalianna wrote: 07 Nov 2020, 02:17 I lend my uncle my 600GB Transcend hard drive (FAT32) to take it to my aunt's house, he calls me one day saying that the hard drive doesn't want to work and after about 4 months he comes back to me to check the drive and I discover that it is in a RAW format, so I started following tutorials on how to recover the files. I used a recovery
software (Easy Recovery) but at the last moment I realized that it was paid and changed to EaseUs Recovery Wizard, which only recovers 80GB of the 400GB I had in use. I used Testdisk and it is not able to find partitions. I realized that before starting the scan this
appears:

Partition Start End Size in Sectors

Invalid FAT boot sector
1* FAT16 >32M 0 32 33 77825 37 36 1250258944
1* FAT16>32M 0 32 33 77825 37 36 1250258944

I searched in google and in the official testdisk page it said that with "RebuildBS" everything would be solved

That is true if the backup boot sector is correct and you don't have other errors. Testdisk does not perform a full chkdsk operation on your partitions. Therefore it can not be aware of possible other errors.

but it wasn't able to find a FAT either and after analyzing the cluster it gave me the option to list the files but when I press enter it said "No filesystem found. Filesystem may be damaged".

Did you run "deep search" as well?

Please help, the files I had were very important for me and I don't know what to do anymore.

You still have Photorec left at the expensive of loosing metadata such as file names, folder names and folder structure.
Using an additional commercial recovery software is recommended as Testdisk is only able to repair some types of errors and Photorec is doing fingerprinting only. Other software will recover remains of directories and maybe using certain internal information if available and plausible.

Transportation is risky for rotating hard drives. I copied the digital heritage of a relative before transporting the drive to my parents because I did not want risk the loss of the original (I did not have a backup of it at the time!).