Recover data from multiple re-partition?

Gnimble · 21 Feb 2013

Hi everyone,

A friend of mine has a 2TB Western Digital Elements hard drive with 100GB free on it. He purchased a Mac so cannot write to the NTFS formatted 2TB Elements. I offered to copy his data out, repartitioned it as exFat so that both Mac and Windows can read and write to it.

Windows report that the drive has 100GB left but when I copied the files, it copied only 812GB. I made the bad assumption that the Windows backup took up the rest of the space and since my friend did not need it, I will just not worry about it.

After repartitioning the drive and formatting it as exFat, I copied the important directories back. I noticed that many of the directories that I copied have very little or no data in them. A file which I googled to be Windows backup binary file, which I did not copy back to the 2TB is itself 760GB. This means I copied only 50GB of data. Yikes!

I unplugged the drive so that no more data will be written to it in hope that I can recover at least some of the data. My friend is having an anxiety attack at the moment... because he does a lot of music writings; his scores and voices are what he wanted back.

Is there a way to recover files from a repartitioned drive that has been repartitioned and formatted twice?

* Original is NTFS with 1.8TB of data
* Reformatted via Mac OS to their Extended (journaled) format by accident. [that created three partitions]
* Repartioned via Windows to one big drive and formatted it as exFat.
* Copied 52GB of data back...

We are both students with very little money; so I hope to find an open source solution if possible. I really brought the guillotine down on my head on this one...

Thank you very much,
-Gnim

Mark Phelps · 23 Feb 2013

You could try using Recuva -- as far as I know, it's still free.

The best data recovery apps I've used come from Runtime Software. You can download, install them and run them for free to do a search of the drive. You can then look at the results to see what they found. But to actually save the files, you have to purchase them -- and last time I checked, it was around $70 for RecoverMyFiles.

Oh, and you would have to connect the drive you want to recover to a working PC -- as you obviously can't install apps on the drive itself.

Gnimble · 24 Feb 2013

Thank you. The 2TB drive is an external drive so until I know for sure that I can or cannot recover data from it, I'll refrain from writing to it. I've tried Recuva, running the slower scan that took over 24 hours in three passes. Unfortunately, it did not find even a single file. I'm currently running a surface scan using UndeletePlus trial. The license is between $39 and $69, I'm not sure until it is registered. It has been running for a half a day so far, no files found yet. When that finishes, I will give Runtime Software a try once UndeletePlus finishes and it finds nothing.

Thanks again Mark.

Blessings,
-G