I Messed Up
Posted: 26 Jan 2024, 05:05
I'm dealing with a Western Digital 5TB My Passport Portable External Hard Drive that stopped functioning a bit over a year ago. It is about 4/5 full with a single partition.
Learned of TestDisk only this year and decided to give (TestDisk-7.2-WIP) it a shot. When I first tried to access the drive I was able to access the lost data and was able to copy some of the files. Tried accessing single folders so as to not bog the system down any more than necessary and to give opportunities to re-organize the data that was saved as I worked.
Found data recovery to be highly successful but a bit slow. Read documentation that suggested that TestDisk was unable to recover data from Deleted Partitions and instructed to identify those as Primary in order to proceed successfully. I wasn't sure which type of partition I was dealing with to begin with and, so, used the Right/Left Arrow Keys to specify P)rimary, thinking that: A - It might speed things up, and B - I can always switch back if this doesn't work. Read later, too late perhaps, that TestDisk is NOW ABLE to restore data from a number of different types of partitions that is in the D)eleted state.
Since identifying the single partition on the drive as P)rimary neither TestDisk or Photorec are able to recognize the partition. Quick Search doesn't find anything and a Full Alternate GPT Search immediately reports numerous read failures, exponentially growing the Log File and completing only as far as 20% over a 48 Hour Period, at which point a Winter Weather Power Failure stopped the process. The resulting Log File was well over a single terabyte in size.
Any Log Files created so far have been too large to open and/or edit and, thusly, deleted (save for the current documents which are Quite Large).
I've also found that I'm no longer able to choose between P)rimary and D)eleted. How can a program identify the type of any partition that you can't identify?
Is there a way to restore the D)eleted designation to the existing partition/files? Or have I destroyed any chance of accessing those files that I did not recover before messin' everything up?
Please let me know of any further information that I can provide.
Allow me to state that I Deeply Appreciate these programs and the power that they provide even though I haven't exactly used them (entirely) correctly so far.
Learned of TestDisk only this year and decided to give (TestDisk-7.2-WIP) it a shot. When I first tried to access the drive I was able to access the lost data and was able to copy some of the files. Tried accessing single folders so as to not bog the system down any more than necessary and to give opportunities to re-organize the data that was saved as I worked.
Found data recovery to be highly successful but a bit slow. Read documentation that suggested that TestDisk was unable to recover data from Deleted Partitions and instructed to identify those as Primary in order to proceed successfully. I wasn't sure which type of partition I was dealing with to begin with and, so, used the Right/Left Arrow Keys to specify P)rimary, thinking that: A - It might speed things up, and B - I can always switch back if this doesn't work. Read later, too late perhaps, that TestDisk is NOW ABLE to restore data from a number of different types of partitions that is in the D)eleted state.
Since identifying the single partition on the drive as P)rimary neither TestDisk or Photorec are able to recognize the partition. Quick Search doesn't find anything and a Full Alternate GPT Search immediately reports numerous read failures, exponentially growing the Log File and completing only as far as 20% over a 48 Hour Period, at which point a Winter Weather Power Failure stopped the process. The resulting Log File was well over a single terabyte in size.
Any Log Files created so far have been too large to open and/or edit and, thusly, deleted (save for the current documents which are Quite Large).
I've also found that I'm no longer able to choose between P)rimary and D)eleted. How can a program identify the type of any partition that you can't identify?
Is there a way to restore the D)eleted designation to the existing partition/files? Or have I destroyed any chance of accessing those files that I did not recover before messin' everything up?
Please let me know of any further information that I can provide.
Allow me to state that I Deeply Appreciate these programs and the power that they provide even though I haven't exactly used them (entirely) correctly so far.