New
#21
Many thanks jumanji. I do wish Microsoft and Apple could agree on a common filesystem!
Another diskpart clean tale of woe
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New #22
I don't believe that there is a an hfs+exfat file system. It's either one or the other. I don't know anything about file recovery so I don't have anything to offer. I've stated before that file recovery isn't guaranteed. You might have to leave this as a lesson learned and from now on have double backups for important data. If you do so you might want to keep one of the drives disconnected except to backup. Only you can determine how much of your time you can afford to spend on this.
As for the file system differences pretty much all OS's have their own be it windows, unix, linux, solaris, mac, mainframe, etc. Mac and windows are so fundamentally different that they really can't have a full common filesystem. It would be easier for mac to share a filesystem with Linux because the permissions are much more complicated on Windows and on top of that windows has efs encryption built in. The fat filesystems are the closest you can get to a compromise between the two because integrating all of the "features" that each company wants onto a single filesystem is probably impossible and certainly impractical. The fat file systems only works with both because they are stripped down to the bare essentials and contain none of the features of either. Really it was Microsoft that developed and patented exfat and do you really think that they would have even considered Macs when designing it? All they where concerned about was sd flash cards and usb flash drives. That was their intended purpose. Mac is only able to support exfat because Apple bought a license to use it and really they didn't even have to do that.Last edited by townsbg; 15 Jul 2016 at 01:15.
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New #23
Correct, but it's possible to have two partitions, one exFAT and one HFS, on one physical drive. That was the situation I had, the exFAT partition allowed me to exchange data with my Windows machines and I needed an HFS partition to use the Time Machine backup software integrated into OSX.
As for file systems, I understand that different developers have differing requirements and objectives, but given that OS X can read an NTFS volume without issue it really shouldn't be a big deal to implement basic write capability. There are drivers available to allow OSX to write to an NTFS partition but they seem to get mixed reviews, because they're not properly integrated into the system. I never tried reading HFS with a Windows machine, but it shouldn't be all that complicated. It's just quite frustrating as someone who uses both systems!
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Posts : 21,004 Desk1 7 Home Prem / Desk2 10 Pro / Main lap Asus ROG 10 Pro 2 laptop Toshiba 7 Pro Asus P2520 7 & 10New #24
I have also been following Jumanji and it is all above me but I did find this that might be of interest to youAs far as I know and perceive exFat does not have MFT but only File Allocation Table. ( I am just learning about exFat because of your problem, and that is still not complete
)
Your sector 0 does show it as an MBR drive but without the partition table. ( an external drive really does not need the MBR code)
I want to see sector 2048 ( seeing is believing). So select sector 2048 with bootice and post a screen shot. The exFat volume bootsector at 2048 will look like this screenshot.
Attachment 389544
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
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New #25
I don't suppose this looks like anything sensible? It seems to contain some elements of the bootsector you posted, split across two blocks
I found this doing a search on the "Remove disks or other media..." string, as simply searching for exFAT was throwing up too many answers.
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New #26
Thanks ICIT2, I saw it too :) during my quick learning. It is Microsoft Proprietary also known as FAT64. And I hardly see any known programs( known to me) dealing with exFAT except TestDisk. If one googles data recovery from exFAT there are many programs flashing but unknown to me or less known.
@CurlyBen,
My experiment failed because I failed to prepare my drive. TestDisk dug out some old NTFS partition and folders in it but not the exFAT with the exFat volume boot sector missing.. Preparation means a complete wipe to remove all old buried hats and bats, that will take about 8 hours and so I shall leave it as an overnight task.
Nevertheless, you can go ahead with TestDisk. No log(Enter), select your drive[Proceed], select only [Intel] Intel /PC partition (Enter) [Analyse](enter) [Quick Search] which may take about four hours. At the end of it if you get a screen like the one below
hit on P and check whether it shows any folders/files. ( You might have already done it but repeat it once again for my sake)( Highlight the Folders and press Enter to see the files)
If it does not, then try Photorec. Check the TestDisk website to check the file formats it can reconstruct and whether your file formats are there.Last edited by jumanji; 15 Jul 2016 at 20:31.
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New #27
Yep, referring to your post#25, those do seem to be related to exFAT but those are faraway from 2048 where the exFat should start if you had only on exFat volume. Just for info tell me how you created the exFAT volume in the first instance.
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New #28
Those screenshots I posted appear to be the only time the string "Remove disks or other media..." occur in the vicinity of the string EXFAT, which I guess isn't too hopeful. I did start searching for the volume label ("red") but I was getting too many false positives for it to be useful. I've set testdisk running but I'm not too hopeful - it's run several times without finding anything useful!
I've been doing some more reading and if I understand correctly the issue now isn't really that the MBR has been wiped, but that the exFAT bootsector has been destroyed for whatever reason? Would initialising the drive in Windows Disk Management have done that?
Unfortunately I can't recall how I created the volume in the first place. I'm fairly sure it was by simply selecting the pre-existing NTFS partition and formatting it as an exFAT drive, but whether that was from Windows Explorer or the OS X Disk Utility I simply can't remember now.
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New #29
Nothing much from the first scan! I've now got a deeper search running
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New #30
The deeper search was no more helpful
I'm now wondering whether there may have been an issue with DMDE being open, as it's found all kinds of partitions previously (though whether it did using the Intel/PC partition table option I can't remember, I've done so many scans). I'll rescan soon but I'm trying something else at the moment - I'm attempting to get my head around how the exFAT bootsector works to see if it's feasible to reconstruct it with the information I have, at least enough to pull all the data off before reformatting.
I think I'm going to invest in an NTFS driver for my Mac and just use NTFS for everything!
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