cgsecurity.org

Hi Christophe,

First of all, thank you for your help, I have been trying to recover a Hard disk for over 6 months now (working on it periodically as I have to recover 4Tb), and TestDisk has been the best solution, so I am really thankful for that.

What I was doing to recover my drive is going folder by folder to list files and copying them in another drive.

I am now struggling, because when I list the files pressing P, the directories are gone so I cannot see the files (I just see files with name: $UGM ). I am desperate, I was being really careful, what I did that broke it was just safe ejecting the drive with windows before turning off the computer, now the directories are just not there.

What can I do now that I do not see the files listed? what should be my next step?

Let me know if I can provide any information, log or anything to make the decision.

Thanks a lot! And happy new year!

You missed to check your drive health. When SMART parameters indicate a dying drive you will have to take a decision to avoid overuse of the drive:

If a file system is still accessible and only some files are important or the drive is only filled to a low degree you might opt to recover on file level as you did.

If, however, you have to recover 4TB as stated above and those 4TB are located on a drive with a total of 4TB the drive is filled up.
In such a case you should have used ddrescue to minimize stressing your drive because the file level access is more stressful for the drive.

You might consider a professional recovery service now are bearing the risk of a total failure when continuing.

Recuperation
(I am not Christophe)

Thanks for the quick response Recuperation, sorry for the confusion!

As I have recovered part of it, I am going to try to determine how much I am missing and to decide if it is worth going to a profesional service or if I should take risk.

In case of option B, trying to recover data on my own, what should be the next step?

There is chapter about ddrescue in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf