Thanks for the confidence dasein. I wish I had more time to devote to learning so I could be really worth the trust you seem to bestow upon me. Yes, I'm still clueless about the 'new changes' they have recently introduced in Linux systems. :/dasein wrote:Both d_l_n and v&n are among the few folks around here whose advice/input/guidance I'd trust without question.
It's still true about photorec, as far as I know from a 5-6 month old experience. Don't know if it has improved in that area in the meanwhile. And that's why photorec should be last option, when testdisk or any other tools the OP might try have failed.dasein wrote:..it's been ages since I've had to resort to photorec, which means that my information may be dated. That said, the last time I used it, it could recover a file, but not the name.
Agree. Although the last time (in 2014, if I remember correctly) I used a highly rated commercial windows-specific tool, called "Get Data Back" by runtime software, it took 24+ hours to recover less than half of the lost data (photos and videos of a studio) from a crashed hard drive that was physically healthy (let me admit that the drive was attached to my laptop via a cheap USB adapter, so that might be a factor in the ridiculously long time). Then just for giggles, I tried photorec on the same arrangement, and it recovered 100% data in less than an hour (yes the naming was a problem, but it didn't matter for the studio guy I was helping). Since then, I've never looked back at windows specific tools. But that may be partly because I've never needed to.dasein wrote:Since the damaged drive is a Windows disk, you might solicit advice from folks more expert in Windows; there may be other tools/options/etc. that folks here simply do not know about.
In one very specific hopeless case in 2009-10, where the drive was so bad that it wouldn't let any system boot that I tried connecting it to, I got unexpected success with the network edition of "Rtools", an old windows software, by booting the system with its 'rescue boot environment CD'. It was specially designed boot environment to handle such cases by ignoring drive errors during boot, then recover whatever was recoverable over network onto another system running its 'Agent' version. Other than that, I've never had any great success with windows tools that I couldn't have more efficiently with testdisk/photorec.
That said, software evolve all the time, and MS is trying harder than ever to cage their users within their commercial eco-system by introducing new 'features' that open software don't always work very well with. So yes, getting a second, third opinion from 'current' windows experts may be worth it.