March2013-TestDisk

TestDisk Experience
This page describes a recent success (in March-2013) in recovering data off of an external hard drive (that I broke due to my clumsiness :( .... ).

Failure
This was a small external 1TB USB-3.0 hard drive. I had this external drive (NTFS formatted) plugged in to my PC and I was rendering some videos on the drive at the same time in which I was backing up data to the drive, and also taking data off the drive to backup elsewhere. This entire operation was in the middle of me simultaneous shuffling data back and forth between external different hard drives and unfortunately 50% of the files on this 1TB external drive had no copies elsewhere.

Then I accidentally bumped the PC, and the external drive which was resting on top of the PC fell to the floor in the middle of an operation of a LOT of data access, forcibly removing the USB cable and jarring the drive with the shock of impact in the middle of this heavy disk access. I can't tell if I had a physical crash of the disk, but in any case, I could no longer nominally access the drive from either MS-Windows (winXP) nor from GNU/Linux. I tried all sorts of 'nominal' access tricks I have learned over the years, and none worked. Of course I tried a "chkdsk /F" in MS-Windows (where F is the MS-Windows name for the drive) but that did not help. The drive was not nominally accessible.

The symptoms were winXP gave a popup when the drive was plugged in, but then MS-Explorer hung for > 30 minutes before I aborted it. I tried a few times with winXP. Nominally winXP mounts the drive in ~20 seconds or so, but no longer. GNU/Linux command (with root permissions) "fdisk -l" could see the drive, but the drive could not be mounted via GUI nor manual command (and I have manually mounted many external drives many 100s (1000s ? ) of times over the years).

TestDisk description
I then surfed Google for a GNU/Linux program to recover data off of an external hard drive and found the GNU/Linux program 'TestDisk' http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk ). I'm an openSUSE GNU/Linux user, and a quick surf on an openSUSE GNU/Linux specific rpm search engine site and I discovered a couple of openSUSE GNU/Linux users had packaged an 'rpm' for the TestDisk program.  So I installed one of their packaged rpm versions and I successfully ran the program 'TestDisk'.

This is a powerful open source software legally free program (free per the free software foundation definition of free under the GPL2 licence).

For GNU/Linux this is NOT a GUI program as it is terminal based, but it is easy to use as it has menu driven selections - making it not too difficult to use for copying files off of the failed disk. It took a while to copy the ~500 or so GBytes off of my 1TB broken external drive (I set it up at 11pm and went to bed, and when I checked it at ~7am it was complete). The hardest part was trying to find 500 GB available off of another external hard drive where I could put the recovered data. ....

I note from the TestDisk web site that TestDisk can run under

• DOS (either real or in a Windows 9x DOS-box), • Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, Windows 7 (x86 & x64),       • Linux,        • FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,        • SunOS and        • MacOS X

Now in my case I am recovered ALL my pictures/videos (~50GB worth) from my last vacation (to Myanmar, where only 50% were backed up elsewhere) plus other home movies from my video camera and various pictures. Losing the Myanmar pictures would be catastrophic. I had been tardy in distributing my offline copies to two separate external hard drives (as I was in the middle of a reshuffling / reorganizing data on my external drives). So from a personal perspective, this recovery was crucial.

I'm happy to say it worked.