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I am a software engineer but haven't messed with drive internals for years.
I also have Stage 3 Cancer with ridiculous medical so trying to find an inexpensive fix.
I have a bad Windows 10 NFTS SSD c: drive (4 partitions) with a large folder of files I desperately need from C drive!
I had done a simple scan of the drive and found a dozen odd bad sectors in the first 20 meg of the drive.
I planned to get that fixed the next day but the drive would not boot! tried several times.
The MFT and MFT mirror may or may not be bad ()bad sectors) I don't know.
I don't care about fixing the drive so much as retrieving the files in a large folder with sub folders
- about 184 Gig total (many images)
My question is
1) can TestDisk recover that folder? (It's in the "users" area for the drive.)
2) How can TestDisk be run? From a boot disk or...?
I appreciate any information you can provide.

Thanks!

Joe

freesoftwarewiz wrote: 14 Jan 2026, 17:17 I am a software engineer but haven't messed with drive internals for years.
I also have Stage 3 Cancer with ridiculous medical so trying to find an inexpensive fix.
I have a bad Windows 10 NFTS SSD c: drive (4 partitions) with a large folder of files I desperately need from C drive!

This is contradictory. There is no "c: drive" holding 4 partitions. There is one SSD (disk!!!)
that is home to 4 partitions. One of them is the partition labeled "c:" As people tend to use the word "partition" and "drive" synonomously one should be pretty precise when it comes to data recovery.
If we are dealing with a hardware issue your problem is not just limited to the c:-partition because SSD deal with a big pools of "blocks". There is no physical separation between partitions as with HDDs.

I had done a simple scan of the drive and found a dozen odd bad sectors in the first 20 meg of the drive.

Did you scan the disk or the drive (c-partition)?
Scanning a dubious disk or partition is a bad idea. You are better of duplicating your disk using ddrescue as described in the manual.

I planned to get that fixed the next day but the drive would not boot! tried several times.

With Testdisk being the exception from the rule in certain clear corner cases there is no fix for broken file systems.

The MFT and MFT mirror may or may not be bad ()bad sectors) I don't know.
I don't care about fixing the drive so much as retrieving the files in a large folder with sub folders
- about 184 Gig total (many images)
My question is
1) can TestDisk recover that folder? (It's in the "users" area for the drive.)

Sorry, I have no crystal ball.

2) How can TestDisk be run? From a boot disk or...?

You can connect the disk that refuses to start to an already running operating system - a second machine.
You could boot your machine using a so-called pen drive (common term )

Standard strategy is to compile a SMART report,

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10910

using it to decide if one should try data recovery oneself or use a commercial lab.

When continuing oneself,
next thing is to duplicate the disk in question using ddrescue under linux.
One can either clone the disk 1:1 or copy its content into a big file.
This is to avoid further degradation.
If the source (folder) to be copied is small compared to the size of the disk you can try to copy the folder directly if you get access to it (see beginning).
Otherwise you would try if TestDisk provides you access to the folder you need and you could copy the folder from within TestDisk.

If that fails try out other commercial software.
The worst case is being forced to use PhotoRec from the TestDisk package.

You can read here:
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

There is a manual and there are recovery examples like the one here:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

MY apologies for any confusion.

The scan I did originally was something i did every month or so. And the drive was booted at the time.
The boot failure started the day after that scan. Haven't run any others like that.

I did not mean to imply the entire disk was the C Just on one of the 4 partitions.
The other partitions did not show errors.

I wasn't trying to get a crystal ball projection, just if TestDrive had a tool for recovering just a folder
The folder I need is about 3/5 the size of the entire c: partition

Unfortunately, I do not have access to a Linux system, just my son's Win 11 laptop which only has 2 USB ports.
So if I use 1 to boot Linux on a USB drive I can't duplicate 2 drives. I do have a boot USB.

I appreciate your help. Thanks.

Joe C.