cgsecurity.org

Dear All,

situation
I wanted to extend the memory of my xbox, so i plugged in a external hard drive and formatted it through the Xbox. After formatting i realised i used the wrong external hard drive. After this i plugged it out and haven't done anything to it since.

Problem
Since it is a backup, it is quite important for me that the file system/structure is restored. First, i tried to do a quick analysis through the testdisk menu. Hard drive --> intel/pc --> analysis. However, no partition was found, even not after a deeper search. Currently the QPhotoRec is running as some kind of last resort but that will not get my structure/filenames back. In the Testdisk manual i found the following command to get the file structure of a hard drive back "chkdsk /f d:". However, since i formatted my hard drive (through my xbox) my computer does not recognize the disk as a file location. It is not displayed in my computer. The drive is, however, displayed in 'device management', drivers are up to date and drive shows no malfunctions.
So, i am searching for either a way to get my files back through the testdisk software/cmd menu OR a way though call the external hard drive through the "chkdsk /f d:"- command. I hope you guys can help.
Thanks in advance.

You may have more luck finding your previous partition using EFI GPT instead of PC Intel.
If it doesn't work, sorting the files recovered by photorec/qphotorec seems to be the way to go.

Thanks for your speedy reply i am trying your suggestion. I am now analysing the disk again. It is analysing at a rate of 2 cylinders per second with 121000 to go, so this may take a while.

Before pressing 'Quick Search' i got the message: "Bad GBT partition, invalid signature."

There seem to be quite some people on the internet that have made the same mistake as me. Can any of you maybe explain how it is possible that for some complete data recovery (and directory structure) is possible and for others not.

It is a day later and the scan is at 50%. Is there any way to speed this process up? according to a paid file system recovery program, it should be nfts. Do I still need to use the mac option?