cgsecurity.org

Hi everyone,

Real newbie to testdisk/photorec.
I recently tried to reinstall Mojave as my laptop came back from the Apple Store wiped after a repair. I have a 4 Tb external hard drive that I had backups and other files on. I thought I could copy the Mojave OS onto the external hard drive (like a file), but I followed the instructions on the Apple site (https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201372) and I wasn't paying attention and instead formatted the external hard drive and Mojave now occupies the hard drive.

I'd like to recover my old files if possible but TestDisk has been extremely slow (running 24 hours for around 5 days now and at 48%), and recently my laptop died when I was using the usb-c power cord for something else and it keeps have read errors. I honestly don't really know how testdisk works so any help would be excellent!

Your data suggests a transfer speed of 4MB/sec as compared to native speeds of 70MB-120/MB depending on the interface.
With regards the claimed read errors in addition to the speed issue you better duplicate your drive using ddrescue as decribed in the manual.

Thanks! I also didn't do my research properly and picked [Analyse] instead of [Advanced], but now when I pick [Advanced] it says there's no partition? It also is displaying that I have no write access (which didn't appear before).

For my purposes of file undeletion, am I supposed to be selecting [Advanced] and should I restart?

No. Once the analysis is ready you select one partition after another running "list files" running the "p"-key for each when it's available. If quick search fails you can run the deep search.