cgsecurity.org

I have a 4TB WD portable external drive that was formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled), with about 1.5TB of media on it. I then accidentally formatted the drive as NTFS. Did this on an Intel Mac using Disk Utility (with NTFS for Mac installed).

I would like to recover the media. I have used TestDisk before successfully a few years ago to recover a Mac partition (on a Mac formatted disk).

So in this instance I ran TestDisk on my Mac, but it didn't see the external drive - because it was NTFS?

What do I need to do in this circumstance for TestDisk to see the drive? This might be slightly unusual as I'm trying to recover a Mac partition on an NTFS disk. Nothing else has happened on the drive since the NTFS format thankfully.

Thanks

StrictMachine616 wrote: 10 Apr 2025, 08:43 I have a 4TB WD portable external drive that was formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled), with about 1.5TB of media on it. I then accidentally formatted the drive as NTFS. Did this on an Intel Mac using Disk Utility (with NTFS for Mac installed).

I would like to recover the media. I have used TestDisk before successfully a few years ago to recover a Mac partition (on a Mac formatted disk).

So in this instance I ran TestDisk on my Mac, but it didn't see the external drive - because it was NTFS?

What do I need to do in this circumstance for TestDisk to see the drive? This might be slightly unusual as I'm trying to recover a Mac partition on an NTFS disk. Nothing else has happened on the drive since the NTFS format thankfully.

Thanks

You were able to recover a Mac partition a few years ago because your partition was not dammaged. It was simply missing in the partition table.
Now, you dammaged your Mac partition on your disk by formating it with the NTFS format. I have no Mac knowledge. If you extended your Mac's capabilities to read, write and format NTFS partitions an empty NTFS partition should be visible right now. This partition will contain dammaged remains of your Apple partition.

In my opinion that invisibility of your NTFS partition suggests that there is more dammage than just the dammage arisen out of the format operation.

There is no function in TestDisk to recover internally dammaged Mac partitions.
Use some other recovery software. If everything fails, use PhotoRec.

Thanks for your reply.