File recovery software recommendation

[cossie0]

Hi

new member but have used MakeMKV for all my BD discs over the past few years but now want to start on my UHD discs.

However that is not the only reason I joined the forum. I am looking for help and advice

I have a Home cinema PC and due to having an older graphics card and HDMI incompatabilities with my audio processor I decided to turn it into a file server and buy a separate media player Zappati or whatever.

During the change I managed to do something stupid and delete all my hard drive allocation (when trying to create a pool within windows) therefore the computer would not recognise them. I did not know this would delete the drives and there was no warning.

I had to go into Disk management and reallocated them with their original drive letters but I now need a program to recover all the data which is around 9TB of MKV films and series on 3 different discs.

The data is still there and the discs have not been written to other than on one of them I also carried out a quick format (probably making it worse).

I have had a look around and there seems to be various programs at various price points.

Does anyone have any experience of these types of programs and which one would do the job at the least cost and hassle.
I obviously dont want to buy one only to find it does not work as I need and then have to go and buy another one.

Thanks for any help

[Woodstock]

It's been a LONG time since I had to do what you need to do - 20 years. Back then, I used a program called "Recovery 2000", which may be the same company that is selling "EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Pro" (logos look similar). If it is, the software works, but plan on it taking a long, long time (DAYS on 120GB drives, which were "big" back then). It basically has to read every part of the disk, looking for the distributed system sectors, and reconstruct them. I think I managed about an 80% success rate with it.

[cossie0]

Thanks Woodstock i saw the Easus which seems to be okay. I have also seen one from Lsoft called active file recovery. There is a 40 dollar difference plus it seems vat on top so if I can get the same results from the cheaper version then that would be better. I have emailed detailing what happened and asked if their program will be able to sort them.

As I say i dont want to get it and find it does not work then have to then get the EaseUS one and have wasted even more time and money.

[Woodstock]

The free trial version will go through the motions but limit how many files you can recover.

The NTFS file system is actually rather robust... But Microsoft has never provided tools for dealing with partition table deletion.

Back when I last did this sort of thing, there were tools that would back up the partition table to the end of the disk, so it could be recovered if the OS tools mangled the main one. As long as you didn't do a format that overwrote the whole disk, you'd be fine.

[Ezatoka]

No matter which program you use in the end, of course you must recover the files onto another hard drive, else you risk overwriting other files before they would be recovered.

[cossie0]

Ah yes thanks good point. Looks like I will have to buy another drive.
Might just go for a 12 or 14TB and then drop that into the Media player. It will let me use the other discs for backup.

No reply to my email yet though. I will run the trial version over the weekend and see if it looks good enough to risk the full purchase.

Thanks again for your help.

[Ezatoka]

for the sole purpose of scanning at first, you could give Recuva a try as well.

[cossie0]

Thanks for the recommendation. I have had a quick look and Recuva seems to be more of an undelete program than a more advanced disk recovery but I will look in a bit more detail.

[kp7409]

I'm actually just in the process of recovering my files as I type.
I accidentally deleted the partition of the disk where all my movies were stored ~1.5tb. The disk shows up as unallocated in windows disk management. Even after adding a drive letter the drive was not accessible.
I've tried a lot of the big name recovery programmes although only in trial. But somehow they fragmented the video files (a mix of m2ts and mkv) and would be impossible to rejoin.
Then I came across a free program called Testdisk -cgsecurity.org. After reading through a recovery example where it uses the analyse tool, I was able to read the disk volume with the original file structure and successfully recover the files onto an external harddisk. It's taken around 5-6 hours.

Hope this helps

[cossie0]

Thanks for that kp I will give this a try tomorrow and let you know how it goes.

[Woodstock]

Kind of late to suggest this, but... It may be best to have TWO drives available for all of this. One that you make an image copy of the original to, sometimes called a "forensic copy". THAT is the one you use as the source for your "play" with the recovery tools, so you always can go back to the original if something goes wildly wrong.

I have hardware to do that (a "toaster" drive assembly that takes two drives and can copy one to the other at "full drive speed"), but the dd utility on unix-like operating systems (including WSL on Win10) can do it, too.

The second drive is to copy the saved results to.

[cossie0]

I have not done anything yet as the drive I thought I had turned out to be a 2TB rather than a 3TB that I need so looks like I will just have to get another drive.
I have had a look around but I am wondering if I should get a 12TB WD elements and shuck it. Black Friday is also round the corner so buy now or wait?

Having said that Woodstock you have another good point.

Woodstock would an image copy a drive exactly regardless of whether the bits are showing or not.

The toaster drive you mention is it like this?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inateck-Dockin ... 00LN0GX4I/

i assume that I would need another 3TB drive though? I mean it needs to be the exact size and I would not be able to use a larger size.

[Woodstock]

The image copy done with dd or a cloning "box" (yes, that link does seem to match what I have) should work just as well as the original for scanning and such. You weren't having any issues with bad sectors, I assume, so the clone should be identical.

The target drive can be bigger than the original, and you can re-use it once you're done. With dd, you can write it to a larger drive as an file; That would let you use the original disk as the source, restoring it if something screws up.

[cossie0]

@KP7409

How did you get on with your recovery. Did you get all of your files back.

I am currently removing a load of games on from one of my gaming PC hard drives on to a USB elements drive in order to be able to empty it. I will then have a 3TB drive to use for recovery. It is taking hours.

Hopefully once I have recovered the first disk then I can use that one for the second and then the second for the third.
Fingers crossed it all works and then I can just transfer all the games back. I will then use a 12TB to back up the lot.
It is going to take days.
That will teach me for not double and triple checking before clicking that mouse button.

[cossie0]

KP7409 are you still around?

I was wondering if you could post the link as to where you read about the recovery example using analyse.
I have recovered my first drive but the file structure is scattered and some of the movies are now two separate files. The file names all seem to be randomly generated.

I don't want to overwrite the original drive just in case there is a better way of doing it. I used PhotoRec the first time.

Thanks