cgsecurity.org

I don't feel that smart right now...

I have an external HDD with 3 partitions, the first of which was roughly 1.8 TB ("stuff") and contained a lot of important data. You can probably see where this is headed...

The other two contained a Chromium OS installation. Said installation wanted to "repair" itself and re-formatted the entire first partition. Oops.

I tried running a Deep Scan, but TestDisk says the partition "stuff" can't be recovered. Here's the log:

http://termbin.com/g0k6

It also told me this:

https://s5.postimg.org/5gamrzjlz/IMG_20 ... 203549.jpg

I tried following those directions, but it still doesn't work... The file list doesn't show any files to be undeleted.

Is there anything I can try now?

Please try latest 7.1-WIP. See https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf on how to install it.
You should be able to recover the stuff partition after Analyse, Quick Search and Deeper Search.

Unfortunately, it still doesn't work. Still tells me that "stuff" couldn't be recovered. Here's the latest log:

http://termbin.com/ge1l

FWIW, I probably would've used PhotoRec and gotten this over with, but I have a lot of binary files with pretty much no identifiable headers (e.g. boot sectors, scripts) that PhotoRec doesn't work well on (I tried when I erased the same drive a few years back -- great luck, eh?).

Also, I don't know why, but somehow every recovery tool I've tried has managed to find an NTFS image file, think it's a partition, and show it ENTIRELY intact, but the stuff partition is never found. :/

FWIW, I also tried increasing the sector count. TestDisk found the partition, but it thought it was corrupted (log: http://termbin.com/x6v7)... gah... :/

Why would recovery tools be having this much trouble? I've seen worse scenarios that somehow managed to have better results...

You can set the STUFF partiton as P(rimary) to recover it and next use fsck.ext4 to try to fix it...