list files in partition give incomplete result
Posted: 19 Feb 2022, 20:16
hello,
I have a 1tb WD hard drive that has failed after a series of blackouts in my office caused by the wind.
A windows system was installed in the hdd, and in fact it has a bigger NTFS partition, a recovery partition from the oem manufacturer, and a much smaller one called "SYSTEM"
the partition I need to recover is the bigger (about 900gb),
after a completed deeper search I was able to reconstruct the partition structure, in fact I know starting and ending sectors of the partition and through testdisk I can access and copy some folders but not all the ones I wanted,
I write on the forum because I noticed a strange behavior of the testdisk software,
I admit that I am working directly on the disk, because I could not get the same results using the partition image file, in this case the partition file system is not recognized and the search process inside the image has taken a lot of time and I can't manage to use the results of that search because it gives a lot of rows of the same partition with different start and end sector addresses, but I can't manage to use that informations to access the files inside.
if I try to read and copy the files running testdisk on windows I can correctly view the complete lists of folders and subfolders, so I was able to recover some data, but selecting a specific folder and starting the copy, the procedure is very slow and it does not seem to go on, and after some hours the progress is not even shown, I obviously think that the slowness is due to the presence of bad sectors and consequent reading errors.
The other scenario is when I tried to run testdisk for the same disk on linux ubuntu system, accessing the file system and viewing the folder lists is much faster and copying the files too, the problem is the lists of subfolders are sorted alphabetically and truncated at some point after a letter, in my case it would seem to be the "S", I obviously noticed that this problem only affects folders with a large number of subfolders
the strange thing is that this problem also affects a folder that I can completely recover in windows because it surely resides in a good status zone of the hard disk and the copy process in testdisk goes on,
in fact If I access to that same folder in windows I obtain a certain list of subfolders and files (complete),
if I acces in linux the list is truncated;
so I suspect that could be a configuration issue of how testdisk "approach" to the partition?
at this point I would like to ask in your opinion which would be the preferable path to follow:
A: try to find a way to speed up file system access and reading, or somehow skip the errors blocking the copy process using windows system
(I have the feeling that there is not much to do unfortunately)
or
B: try to solve the problem of truncating the returned list of files inside a folder in system linux ubuntu
regarding this last option, I found a forum thread that should be relevant:
viewtopic.php?t=4526
as the user is asked, also in my case I am sure that the partition is of type NTFS
if they are not strictly necessary for the moment I would prefer not to attach the logs in public, due to the fact that some file and folder names may contain personal information of third parties, maybe I will censore them in some way before posting.
I hope I have succeeded in explaining what my request is, and I apologize in advance for any incompleteness or incomprehensible sentences, if other information is needed I am ready to send additions to the information I have already provided.
thank you
Giovanni
I have a 1tb WD hard drive that has failed after a series of blackouts in my office caused by the wind.
A windows system was installed in the hdd, and in fact it has a bigger NTFS partition, a recovery partition from the oem manufacturer, and a much smaller one called "SYSTEM"
the partition I need to recover is the bigger (about 900gb),
after a completed deeper search I was able to reconstruct the partition structure, in fact I know starting and ending sectors of the partition and through testdisk I can access and copy some folders but not all the ones I wanted,
I write on the forum because I noticed a strange behavior of the testdisk software,
I admit that I am working directly on the disk, because I could not get the same results using the partition image file, in this case the partition file system is not recognized and the search process inside the image has taken a lot of time and I can't manage to use the results of that search because it gives a lot of rows of the same partition with different start and end sector addresses, but I can't manage to use that informations to access the files inside.
if I try to read and copy the files running testdisk on windows I can correctly view the complete lists of folders and subfolders, so I was able to recover some data, but selecting a specific folder and starting the copy, the procedure is very slow and it does not seem to go on, and after some hours the progress is not even shown, I obviously think that the slowness is due to the presence of bad sectors and consequent reading errors.
The other scenario is when I tried to run testdisk for the same disk on linux ubuntu system, accessing the file system and viewing the folder lists is much faster and copying the files too, the problem is the lists of subfolders are sorted alphabetically and truncated at some point after a letter, in my case it would seem to be the "S", I obviously noticed that this problem only affects folders with a large number of subfolders
the strange thing is that this problem also affects a folder that I can completely recover in windows because it surely resides in a good status zone of the hard disk and the copy process in testdisk goes on,
in fact If I access to that same folder in windows I obtain a certain list of subfolders and files (complete),
if I acces in linux the list is truncated;
so I suspect that could be a configuration issue of how testdisk "approach" to the partition?
at this point I would like to ask in your opinion which would be the preferable path to follow:
A: try to find a way to speed up file system access and reading, or somehow skip the errors blocking the copy process using windows system
(I have the feeling that there is not much to do unfortunately)
or
B: try to solve the problem of truncating the returned list of files inside a folder in system linux ubuntu
regarding this last option, I found a forum thread that should be relevant:
viewtopic.php?t=4526
as the user is asked, also in my case I am sure that the partition is of type NTFS
if they are not strictly necessary for the moment I would prefer not to attach the logs in public, due to the fact that some file and folder names may contain personal information of third parties, maybe I will censore them in some way before posting.
I hope I have succeeded in explaining what my request is, and I apologize in advance for any incompleteness or incomprehensible sentences, if other information is needed I am ready to send additions to the information I have already provided.
thank you
Giovanni
