Help with TestDisk

[soonchica]

I tried searching in existing threads, but with no luck.

My hdd crashed, I installed OS on another hdd, but would like to recover data from the crashed one if possible (KDE Partition Manager sees it as /dev/sdb (ATA SAMSUNG SP1614C 149.05GiB which is correct, as it's 160 GB HDD)), so I searched and found TestDisk, installed it through Synaptic and run it from Konsole. I read TestDisk StepByStep but I have no clue what to do with the results.

TestDisk recognizes HDD (>Disk /dev/sdb - 160GB/149GiB - SAMSUNG SP1614C), detects its Intel partition table, but Quick Search under Analyse says: The harddisk (160GB/149GiB) seems too small! (<277GB/258GiB) Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings, BIOS detection... and then after continue it displays two partitions with D (deleted) prefix which give no files when I press P to list files.

I have no idea how to proceed, the size of 160GB is correct, but TestDisk gives other result, I read here that it could be wrong head and sector numbers, but didn't figure it out.

Screenshots of the whole proces (last few are errors during deep search)




I tried to Analyse it as "none" instead of "Intel" partition table and got


If anyone has any ideas how to proceed, I'd appreciate it.

Log file is attached

[Rod J]

Did you try PhotoRec which comes with the TestDisk program that you've already installed? http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

If TestDisk can't recover the partitions because of disk damage in critical areas of the disk there is still a chance that PhotoRec can recover some data because it works at a lower level (raw sectors) of the drive regardless of the state of the partitions or even file systems. It will take a loooong time to scan the drive though.

Just make sure to save any recovered data to another physical drive though (don't write to the damaged drive).

[soonchica]

No, I haven't tried PhotoRec, but will try and report how it goes.

If PhotoRec finds and rescues my files, I guess it will be safe to format the whole HDD with KDE partition manager and then test it for problems and if there are none to continue to use it as a secondary HDD.

[Rod J]

Hopefully you will get all the data back, but it's a long shot really.

After you have recovered the data I would check the drive thoroughly with a SMART tool that can run the internal drive tests to see if the drive is going to be worth using or too risky to use (or just completely stuffed). I use the gui tool 'gsmartcontrol', you should find it using Synaptic. Try both the Short Self-Test and the Extended Self-test. The Extended test will take some time as it scans all the sectors on the drive to see if they are OK. Please report back what you find out. I think the drive may be toast if critical areas are indeed physically damaged.

There is also another non-gui tool that you can try too: 'badblocks'. It can lock out damaged sectors (marks them as bad) so the file system doesn't try to use them. I used it on a drive that had some bad sectors some time ago and I'm still using the drive successfully now on my other PC. I wouldn't depend on the drive completely though.

[soonchica]

I tried PhotoRec, it took a while to let it run bcs it took ~5hrs for it to finish. I got 373 recup_dir folders with 14657 filles about 1GB in total, of which loads of partial txt files and .h .c .csv .dll .gif .gz partial .html and other.

All in all I did get 14k files, but all named fxxxx(number) and all that I could read are partial, except image files (gif, jpg, png) and 17 pdf files.

I saved all of it and will try to sift through it but am not very optimistic.

Will try to be persistent and find out if there is a way to play around with geometry with TestDisk and get all I can out of it.