Disk structure is corrupt and unreadable

Ah, good question

The two directories dot (.) and dotdot (..) are current directory and parent directory
Arrow down to .. and Enter
Continue moving up until you reach Downloads, then arrow down to the Recovery folder I suggested you make and press Enter

Photorec will find what it can. You will have to decide what get moved. Some will be recoverable, but a lot of old files will have been completely overwritten and will not be recoverable.

edit: jumanji is back and I will sit on the sidelines. Too many people giving instructions does not help, it often confuses things and makes the recovery more difficult. jumanji has been helping you, so please continue following his instructions. He is one of the best at data recovery (probably other things as well, but definitely data recovery)

@jumanji: Sleep well, my friend. I'll help where I can.

@shokan: Let Photorec run until it is complete (11 hrs estimate)
That will put it at about 01:40 AM our time on Friday.

If you're awake and Photorec is done, post a screen shot. There's no need for intermediary shots unless something needs to be addressed. Just let it do it's job and hopefully you'll have your data, or most of it.

I won't be awake at that time, at least I don't think I will.

Bill
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Is Photorec done?
Are you only selecting one file type at a time? That will take quite a while because Photorec has to scan the faulty drive each time. If you select multiple file type (or all) then Photorec can collect the files in the same scan.

How much space is available for this recovery on C:\? I know you mentioned the sheer size of a years work, so I want to be certain you don't bang up against a space limitation.

Remember that you are only recovering files and any reference to each other is not part of the process.

Once the files are recovered, it might be possible to reconstruct the relationship.

I want to review the thread to see what has already been tried (I know some things were not successful), but I don't want to move away from Photorec since it is capable of getting some files. That's the difficult part of data recovery - it's not guaranteed and you have to find the tool or tools that can retrieve data from a faulty drive.
Photorec might recognize .vob file by another type (mp4).

If you have an existing .vob file, see if the Photorec fidentify utility can identify it.
launch a Command Prompt
navigate to where you have Tesdisk (Downloads\Testdisk...) folder and enter
fidentify_win <test file location>\Some.vob

It might come back unknown, or it might identify the file as another type.

There's another option if it comes back unknown. You can build a signature file for .vob and add it to Photorec. I've never done it, but it shouldn't be too hard. Determine what makes a .vob file identified, use the identifier and file offset for Photorec. But.... that too might not work and as I said, it is untested by me.

After fidentify tells you about .vob, skip the recovery of .vob files for now and focus on other file types that you can recover with Photorec.

Bill
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Just checked your Disk Mgmt: you only have 24 GB on your C: drive
The external drive is 1 TB - how much space was used on that drive?

You raised a good point when you asked about the files Photorec would recover.

You and jumanji might have already gone over this and there might be another disk used as the destination.
That's the only way I see this working.

Do you have another 1 TB (or larger) drive? The free space should be equal to or greater than the capacity of the faulty drive. This way, you know that everything recovered will fit on the destination.

Bill
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Does this mean you are testing another program or you want to know about another program?

The way I read your post, it sounds as though you are testing another program.
I read in the thread that you tried Active File Recovery for Windows (LSoft), but because it was the demo version, you could not recover your data (or the size of the recovery was limited). This is true for most of the demo or trial software.

If you are testing another program, please let members on this side of your monitor know which one you're trying. It helps all of us, that's how I learned about Testdisk (thanks jumanji). It was very similar to a commercial product I used before so the learning curve wasn't that bad.

Perhaps the program you're trying now will solve the "Where do I put this stuff dilemma".

Good luck.

Bill
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