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I've been trying to use testdisk to get data from a hard drive with a messed up mbr table. After several tries with testdisk and photorec taking too long, I decided to try connecting the external drive to a different computer, at which point testdisk was somehow able to detect my partitions and let me copy a few files before it couldn't detect anything again.

Is there something I can try to replicate my one successful drive read? The drive is NTFS formatted and may have mild damage, and testdisk usually says that both the boot sector and back up sector are bad and won't scan any further. Thanks for any help provided.

Hello Gadolinium,

Gadolinium wrote: 27 Mar 2019, 03:36 Is there something I can try to replicate my one successful drive read? The drive is NTFS formatted and may have mild damage, and testdisk usually says that both the boot sector and back up sector are bad and won't scan any further. Thanks for any help provided.

first check out your drive for suspicious error messages. SMART-Tools like Crystaldiskinfo or smartmontools will do the job.
Look for "pending sectors" above zero or error rates etc.

Duplicate the drive with a fault tolerant tool (not dd_rescue) like ddrescue unter linux.
Then let photorec operate on the copy.
Photorec works well on drives without unreadable sectors.

If your drive has lots of errors ddrescue will consume most of the total recovery time.
Photorec should simply run through afterwards.