cgsecurity.org

Hey all, first thank you for this tool. Test disk and photorec are the closest I've come to recovering data that is priceless to me and several other people...

That said, I can't "choose" the destination drive. Meaning, I've identified them as some combination of the letters SDA, SDD, etc., and those are located in the DEV directory. The left key does NOT show me my drives. I've pushed it several thousand times. No way to choose my external, formatted, empty and equally-sized HDD. I'm at a loss. I have tried several (10) recovery systems, linux, bootdisks, and I can't send the recovered data to my external HDD.

Does anyone have any thoughts/experience? lI would ask you be as specific as possible. I have to be missing something, but I can't figure it out. THanks again...

You forgot to tell which OS (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X...) you are using.
Extract from https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

Choose the directory where the recovered files should be written. Use the arrow keys (up, down, left, right) to navigate,
you can also use the enter key to enter into a directory.
• Dos/Windows/Os2: To get the drive list (C:, D:, E:, etc.), use the arrow keys to select .., press the Enter key
- repeat until you can select the drive of your choice. Validate with Y es when you get the expected destination.
• Linux: File system from external disk may be available in a /media, /mnt or /run/media sub-directory.
Mount your destination drive if necessary.
• Mac OS X: Partitions from external disk are usually mounted in /Volumes.

If it doesn't work as expected, move testdisk directory to your destination drive and start it from here.