Disk recovery problem
 

Your thoughts please. I am recovering files from a healthy drive that was soft formatted in error a few years ago. It is a Western Digital 2TB USB hard drive. I am using TestDisk by Britec and have been unable to contact them of my concerns. Recovery is to 2TB docked hard drive.with spare capacity of 729GB.The recovery needs may exceed this so I am manually pruning the directories the recovery app makes. After 20 hours of recovery 11% has been recovered so far. In pruning the files there seems to be more repetition than expected. In 50 directories the same MS Word item has appeared 250 times. Sound file items about the same. With 3577 directories created so far I am concerned I will get MS Word same documents over 15 thousand times. The Britec web page referred to is no longer valid and for some reason I cannot make comment on the many videos touching on the use of TestDisk. I am aware there are many good paid for apps for recovery but right now funds are in short supply.

I'm unable to comment on current iterations of M$-based recovery software as I've not used any in years, however as a general practice I'd first duplicate the disk you want to recover (at bit-level) and attempt recovery on the duplicated disk. This ensures you don't irreversibly destroy data on the original.

As far as software is concerned, they generally work on similar principles, so a decent open-source version may well work similarly to a paid-for package, but in any event I guess it depends upon the value you place upon the 'lost' data. Many years ago I used a package on a M$ system called 'recuva', it seemed to do the job at the time, may be worth seeing if it's still around?

Finally, if I were attempting data recovery these days I'd use Linux, a 'live' distro could well do the job... have to go now but let me know if that's of any interest.

FP.

Reply to the problem
 

The disk cannot be copied as it has no drive letter, and marked as unallocated. Windows only allows format and make the drive active which then makes all data not recoverable. However the good news is I found the problem and the app is working good. I am half way though recovery with about 350 GB recovered. It will take another 24 hours to complete the task leaving I would guess 50 GB spare on the recovery drive. The mistake was me not looking at the settings enough. There is box with boxes to tick. This box has a thousand and one file types to recover preselected. On the present attempt I found this box and selected the ten file types I need. Windows seems to find pleasure in making multiple copies of file. Interestingly I have recovered the full maintenance records for a Puma SA330 auctioned in the Middle East, maintenance manual for that and others. These take up a lot of space. Detail. Here in Bali the weather is downright cold at 27C today which is handy as the drive being recovered is running at 40C internal temperature, well within its 60C limit. Overall an interesting problem to come across. The recovery app is recommended.

First Principal, an add on here. I have Recuva. An excellent app. However the drive has no drive letter so cannot be recognised in its search. The drive in this case showed as as drive 1 in admin tools, management, storage. My drive condition app, Crystal, recognised it and besides telling me the drive health it shows the internal temperature which matters over the long run time. Crystal is the app and very useful.

I've made a note of the app just in case. As you've found, most of the Microsoft tools rely on Windows being able to see the partition and I've found in the past that Linux isn't very good at handling Microsoft formatted disks, though that may have changed now.

As far as I can tell Britec is a Youtuber who writes about using the product, rather that something to do with its development??

Good luck with your file recovery.

Piggybank; good to read you're underway with the recovery. I've had to put drives in a freezer before today in order to effect a partial recovery - although this has been due to faulty hardware, not simply a misapplied format.

I realise you're sorted now so won't go into detail but, in case it helps anyone else in the future, Linux doesn't typically use drive letters as such, and I find working with drives generally easy + comprehensive where needed. It's very simple to duplicate drives and is generally compatible with NTFS, FAT, FAT32, exFAT (typical M$ formats) along with many others. Netstruggler; the latter has sometimes been dependent upon distribution so you may have struck one that didn't have the facility, or was quite old, recent versions of Ubuntu etc are fairly universal wrt disk formats.

FP.