Formatted My Book as a recovery drive - Oops!

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
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During a Windows 10 PC’s drive recovery process, I managed to convert the attached (USB) My Book (2TB) into a recovery drive. I’m now in the process of trying to recover the old partitions and the files that were blown away on the My Book.

Christophe Grenier’s TestDisk, v7.0 is a data recovery utility that can restore deleted partitions. It has discovered (at 76% of the search so far):

  • one FAT32 LBA partition (the 32GB recovery drive, I assume)
  • two Linux partitions, each having 15726592 sectors (what??)
  • a broken FAT32 partition
    FAT32 LBA 0 32 33 4177 117 36 67108864 [ESD-USB]
    Linux 21166 190 17 22145 173 44 15726592
    Linux 74474 71 30 75453 54 57 15726592
    check_FAT: can’t read FAT boot sector
    Invalid FAT boot sector
    0 D FAT32 LBA 471017 229 22 720115 106 42 4001751642
    FAT32 LBA 471017 229 22 720115 106 42 4001751642

I’ve used the My Book drive in two ways:

  • with WD Smartware to backup (this is now older backup content).
  • copying files directly from my PC’s drive a folder in the My Book’s root (my latest data).
    I’m interested primarily in recovering my latest copied files, not the backups.

But here are my questions:

  1. What are the Linux partitions that TestDisk is finding?
  2. Should I assume the broken FAT32 partition is the one I want?
  3. If I go after the Smartware backups, what is the list of partitions (type, quantity, size) which I have to restore?

Thanks!
/John

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As far as I know, test disk is not designed for recovering partitions themselves. It is designed to read the signatures of files based on their headers and try to recover the files. I used it once and most of the files it recovered were useless.

Mind you, there products are evolving and it may now be far more advanced than when I used it.

An alternate option for you would be Active@.

Try this URL. I have downloaded and used Active@ and it is very powerful. I used it to examine and trace the MFT, the heart of an NTFS system.

See the toolkit package that contains Active@ Disk Editor