cgsecurity.org

Hi!

Trying to recover a 4TB disk from a friend using testdisk from my 1TB Fedora laptop. Went to bed last night at 6% completed, checked this morning and still at 6% but every cylinder had an error... and my disk was full. The textdisk log file was 260GB and nothing else was really working anymore on that full disk.

So my first question is how much space is needed to perform an analysis and eventually recover a x TB size disk? Does the generated log file occupy as much (if not more) space than the original disk under repair?

Could those systematic errors be due to the fact that the disk testdisk is running from was full?

I deleted that log file and hope to perform another run once i better understand this.
Thank you.

Fred

Bad news, unfortunately!

The most probable cause is that your log file got so long because your disk is broken and sectors cannot be read.
TestDisk then logged each unreadable sector causing the log file to grow so heavily.

If you still had the log file you could have opened it up with a hex editor such as HxD and see the ever repeating text.
I do not recommend rerunning TestDisk as your disk already seems to be heavily dammaged.

To learn more about the state of your disk, you could at least read your SMART parameters, as described in
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10910

If you do not want to use the service of a professional recovery lab, you can use ddrescue (linux software) as described in the manual to clone the disk - after posting the SMART parameters here.

Ok. Well thank you for this prompt and very clear answer. From what I know it was mainly music files on the disk, so nothing really unreplaceable.

TestDisk is running and at cylinder 3. I'll stop it and see if there is anything else I can do but will not spend too much time anymore.

Thank you.