I have been for more or less 3 weeks not being able to access my hard drive (Hitachi...750Gb...dunno much more about it
).I work for long hours during the day and then only can access the internet on my workplace to take care of this when everyone else leaves, so the time I've dedicated to solve this problem has not been as much as I wanted to.
After a lot of tries and investigation (I read some topic of this forum as well), I came across this Teskdisk/Photorec possibility. I have them on Parted Magic (Linux) 3.5.6 (from a bootable CD which is one of the very few things my notebook can run.
So, I believe that these are my last options, so I'd like to use them right, I tried both Teskdisk and PhotoRec already but Testdisk usually stops at the 169th cylinder in the Quick Search (from 91200) and Photorec was running "well" (with some errors) but taking an estimated time of between 2500 and 5000h (no kidding!!!). I was reading some topics cause I found it strange and read it is (of course) not normal so I stopped it, especially after realizing that the folder structure and file names wouldn't be kept.
Anyways, I'd like to ask you, if possible, for some advice on this matter, cause I'm feeling kinda desperate and I sense these programs are very good and powerful but...you really need to know how to use them.
What I did on Testdisk was:
1st. Running it as root (I believe so: "sudo testdisk" in ROXTerm);
2nd. Simply selecting the harddrive (it was shown and measured correctly);
3rd. Select EFI (cause that is what Testdisk automatically detected;
4th. Analyse (cause I don't have a reason to do anything else than the standard procedure);
And 6 partitions are shown (and they all have a text between square brackets which I read was good) but there is a message saying "No FAT, NTFS, ext2, JFS, Reiser, cramfs or XFS marker" after the second partition (which is named as "Unknown" and another message saying "check_FAT: can't read FAT boot sector" and then the first message again after the 3rd partition (which shows up twice - I read it's not good!)
5th. Quick Search anyways
And this is where it gets stuck at the 169th cylinder "00%" (I tried waiting for over half an hour and it stays like that)
(I also have Testdisk and another recovery program on a USB stick and I have the possibility of removing the hardrive and plugging it into another computer with Windows 7 and try to run the programs from there, but I'd like to know your opinion on that first)
So...I know it is maybe tempting to tell me..."Man...if you want your data back, prepare yourself to pay a lot of money!"...but if any of you has any suggestions/advice that might help me in avoiding that, I would be the most grateful person in this world!
Thanks, and hopefully you'll see this and reply (it's my first post ever so I don't really know how this works)
