Good luck. What recovery software are you using? I once formatted an SD card in camera, and forgot that I didn't copy all the images from it first. Recovery software found a bunch of thumbnail files, but not much useful data.

I use Puran File Recovery. Thanks to having regularly defragmented, it seems to have recovered everything (about 200GB on a 1TB drive) in 16 hours. I will have to check everything that can be tested over the weekend, and buy some good quality BDR discs to back it all up before the next disaster happens (had 3 drive failures, including a smart failure on a drive that was weeks out of warranty, so I'm not optimistic that I won't have another mishap soon).

I was fascinated by the Linus Tech Tips video on the Rapidspar, as it's the first video I've seen that talks about what the professional data recovery people actually do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyr14_B230o

It's just a teensy bit tempting to drop $2000 on one of those widgets, and then try to find 20 people willing to pay $100 to recover a seemingly dead drive - but I doubt that would work out very well. So I keep hoping that maybe I can find one in the trash some day. Or save the life of someone who owns one, or marry someone who owns one, or something.

For something like this where the partition table was deleted but the areas of the drive where the data was stored was untouched, you’ll be able to recover all of it.

It’ll take time like your seeing but it should all be viable in the end.

Any of the recovery software for ‘Deleted’ files works about the same so in a situation like this buy the cheapest software you can.

Make sure to recover data to a different drive, don’t overwrite the one you are working on! (I’ve seen people do that)

It’s only when you get into overwritten data, bad sectors or hardware failures that the tools you want to use will change.

One of my favorite tools was a small program that would boot from a floppy and let you do a sector by sector copy. Similar to dd in Linux but much more powerful. You could enable or disable the cache in the drive if that was faulty. Power cycle the drive if it timed out. You could stop and save progress at any point, specify retries before skipping a sector, copy any range of sectors or start from the end of drive and work towards the front.

It was like a puzzle, piecing together as many good sectors as you could to try and get a complete as possible picture of the data.

I did this for 7-8 years in the late 00’s to early 10’s. Was the most fun and rewarding part of that job.

gbeirn wrote on 2020-09-25, 22:23:

For something like this where the partition table was deleted but the areas of the drive where the data was stored was untouched […]
Show full quote

For something like this where the partition table was deleted but the areas of the drive where the data was stored was untouched, you’ll be able to recover all of it.

It’ll take time like your seeing but it should all be viable in the end.

Any of the recovery software for ‘Deleted’ files works about the same so in a situation like this buy the cheapest software you can.

Make sure to recover data to a different drive, don’t overwrite the one you are working on! (I’ve seen people do that)

It’s only when you get into overwritten data, bad sectors or hardware failures that the tools you want to use will change.

One of my favorite tools was a small program that would boot from a floppy and let you do a sector by sector copy. Similar to dd in Linux but much more powerful. You could enable or disable the cache in the drive if that was faulty. Power cycle the drive if it timed out. You could stop and save progress at any point, specify retries before skipping a sector, copy any range of sectors or start from the end of drive and work towards the front.

It was like a puzzle, piecing together as many good sectors as you could to try and get a complete as possible picture of the data.

I did this for 7-8 years in the late 00’s to early 10’s. Was the most fun and rewarding part of that job.

I think I need to hear what this utility was called. I was working for an underequipped mom&pop computer shop during part of that time frame (about 5 to 7 years before you) and data recovery ended up becoming my specialty. I would have thought that described ddrescue, but I think you named features that it doesn't have.

While I am very happy for debs3759 for being able to recover his data I think this is still another example of why it is important to have at least one complete backup of all valuable data.

Make backups, guys! 👍

Stiletto wrote on 2020-09-26, 00:28:

gbeirn wrote on 2020-09-25, 22:23:

For something like this where the partition table was deleted but the areas of the drive where the data was stored was untouched […]
Show full quote

For something like this where the partition table was deleted but the areas of the drive where the data was stored was untouched, you’ll be able to recover all of it.

It’ll take time like your seeing but it should all be viable in the end.

Any of the recovery software for ‘Deleted’ files works about the same so in a situation like this buy the cheapest software you can.

Make sure to recover data to a different drive, don’t overwrite the one you are working on! (I’ve seen people do that)

It’s only when you get into overwritten data, bad sectors or hardware failures that the tools you want to use will change.

One of my favorite tools was a small program that would boot from a floppy and let you do a sector by sector copy. Similar to dd in Linux but much more powerful. You could enable or disable the cache in the drive if that was faulty. Power cycle the drive if it timed out. You could stop and save progress at any point, specify retries before skipping a sector, copy any range of sectors or start from the end of drive and work towards the front.

It was like a puzzle, piecing together as many good sectors as you could to try and get a complete as possible picture of the data.

I did this for 7-8 years in the late 00’s to early 10’s. Was the most fun and rewarding part of that job.

I think I need to hear what this utility was called. I was working for an underequipped mom&pop computer shop during part of that time frame (about 5 to 7 years before you) and data recovery ended up becoming my specialty. I would have thought that described ddrescue, but I think you named features that it doesn't have.

For the life of me I can’t remember what it was called. Been trying to remember since I posted this. I know it was a Russian piece of software. It was licensed specifically to the company I was working for. It had a blue background. The boot screen had a .ru website listed but it was already nonexistent by the time I started using it in 2006-2007.

Can’t believe my memory is getting that bad already, I’ll have to dig though old emails to see if I can find it.

debs3759 wrote on 2020-09-25, 18:02:

Been testing and wiping a large box full of hard drives lately, originally bought as untested. Most drives are straightforward. Secure erase all data and free sectors. Should be simple.

Then I found a couple of drives with efi partitions. One for Windows (100MB), one for Mac (200MB). They can't just be deleted.

When I need to securely erase an old disk, I always do it using a live Linux distro which I boot up from a CD/DVD. No issues whatsoever when erasing Windows boot partitions. After that, I run a tool like shred to wipe the newly unformatted disk.

Any other hard disks and USB drives remain physically disconnected from the motherboard until the entire process is finished.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-09-26, 05:25:

Any other hard disks and USB drives remain physically disconnected from the motherboard until the entire process is finished.

That's what I will be doing now, remove all but the system drive (which I back up weekly).

gbeirn wrote on 2020-09-26, 04:56:

Stiletto wrote on 2020-09-26, 00:28:

gbeirn wrote on 2020-09-25, 22:23:

For something like this where the partition table was deleted but the areas of the drive where the data was stored was untouched […]
Show full quote

For something like this where the partition table was deleted but the areas of the drive where the data was stored was untouched, you’ll be able to recover all of it.

It’ll take time like your seeing but it should all be viable in the end.

Any of the recovery software for ‘Deleted’ files works about the same so in a situation like this buy the cheapest software you can.

Make sure to recover data to a different drive, don’t overwrite the one you are working on! (I’ve seen people do that)

It’s only when you get into overwritten data, bad sectors or hardware failures that the tools you want to use will change.

One of my favorite tools was a small program that would boot from a floppy and let you do a sector by sector copy. Similar to dd in Linux but much more powerful. You could enable or disable the cache in the drive if that was faulty. Power cycle the drive if it timed out. You could stop and save progress at any point, specify retries before skipping a sector, copy any range of sectors or start from the end of drive and work towards the front.

It was like a puzzle, piecing together as many good sectors as you could to try and get a complete as possible picture of the data.

I did this for 7-8 years in the late 00’s to early 10’s. Was the most fun and rewarding part of that job.

I think I need to hear what this utility was called. I was working for an underequipped mom&pop computer shop during part of that time frame (about 5 to 7 years before you) and data recovery ended up becoming my specialty. I would have thought that described ddrescue, but I think you named features that it doesn't have.

For the life of me I can’t remember what it was called. Been trying to remember since I posted this. I know it was a Russian piece of software. It was licensed specifically to the company I was working for. It had a blue background. The boot screen had a .ru website listed but it was already nonexistent by the time I started using it in 2006-2007.

Can’t believe my memory is getting that bad already, I’ll have to dig though old emails to see if I can find it.

That rings a bell. There was that one Russian site that had a ton of drive firmwares? They may mention it there too.

I don't think it's the tool you mentioned, especially considering some of the fancier features, but there's also the well known open-source one, TestDisk, and it even has MSDOS version.
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Meowdori wrote on 2020-09-26, 20:48:

I don't think it's the tool you mentioned, especially considering some of the fancier features, but there's also the well known open-source one, TestDisk, and it even has MSDOS version.
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Thanks for the link. I added the files and source code to my toolkit. Open Source is always my favourite sort of app, and DOS support as well 😀

gbeirn wrote on 2020-09-26, 04:56:

For the life of me I can’t remember what it was called. Been trying to remember since I posted this. I know it was a Russian piece of software. It was licensed specifically to the company I was working for. It had a blue background. The boot screen had a .ru website listed but it was already nonexistent by the time I started using it in 2006-2007.

Can’t believe my memory is getting that bad already, I’ll have to dig though old emails to see if I can find it.

Hope you remember ! Have had a Transcopy 3 card for decades that has saved data off many old floppy disks (yes it also has other purposes), hoping to find something good for old HD's !
added: Looked through some old archives and found MTP - BPR (not the same as you mentioned but interesting:
info: https://web.archive.org/web/20050207062251/ht … are.com/mtl.htm)

Plugged in a 1TB drive yesterday, and the PC wouldn't boot. I put it on the scrap pile. Decided to plug it into the running PC a couple of hours ago, and it was recognised by Windows. So I checked the drive - it had a single NTFS partition. So I decided to wipe the partition table with diskpart, and rebooted. Now it booted fine! No idea what could have been in the partition table that stopped it booting, but no complaints now I know how easy that was to fix 😀

Now 2 hours into an 18 hour surface test. Then got to wipe the drive. If there are no bad sectors, it'll be nice for one of my more recent test systems 😀 Or maybe for storing backups and apps 😀

debs3759 wrote on 2020-09-25, 18:02:

The drive is uninitialised, so I must have erased the partition table from that drive by mistake! That'll teach my for doing that sort of task on my main PC.

Ouch 😒
This is exactly why I've always used one of my spare rigs for tasks of this nature, because I wanted my main database rig (containing all of my data) to be as independent/standalone as could be.