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my partitions are lost and my datas are also lost when I use ntfsfix on my hard drive. For the partition table like this:

sdb        disk 
  └─sdb1     unallocated
  └─sdb5     /DATA1
  └─sdb6     /DATA2

Instead of using ntfsfix on /dev/sdb5 or /dev/sdb6, my brain told me to try using it on /dev/sdb, and as a result all my partitions were lost and my data was lost.

Is there a way to restore it?, I've tried using testdisk it doesn't work, or maybe I'm using testdisk wrong.

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  • Testdisk is for recovering partitions, that themselves contain valid filesystems.. whats the output of sudo fdisk -l? so I know this is late advice, but always run filesystem checks in a native environment (so windows for NTFS, linux for ext/btrfs/whateverelse). also, dont even think you can approach this recovery without at least one additional disk of the same size as the original. never ever attempt to restore data to the physical disk you are trying to recover it from, unless its a simple file undelete (which this is not).
    – Frank Thomas
    Commented Mar 23, 2022 at 5:06
  • Please do not cross-post. For the record: the other copy is on U&L SE.
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Commented Mar 23, 2022 at 5:18
  • After i type 'sudo fdisk -l', i think the partitions still available but it shows Partition 1, 2, 3 does not start on physical sector boundary, and at the end Partition table entries are not in disk order., what should I do to fix it @FrankThomas?.
    – ooo4news
    Commented Mar 23, 2022 at 5:34
  • Were all the partitions formatted as NTFS?
    – harrymc
    Commented Mar 23, 2022 at 10:17
  • @harrymc, yes, the hard drive was from Windows so it was all ntfs and there was too much data there to change the hard drive to ext4 or something else so I still use ntfs on Linux. But this seems almost solved, I install Windows on my pc and checked the hard drive again, and it seems my partition can be recovered.
    – ooo4news
    Commented Mar 23, 2022 at 12:31

1 Answer 1

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See the good advice in the post Recovering broken or deleted NTFS partitions.

The first point is to clone the disk, so as not to operate directly on the damaged disk:

sudo ddrescue /dev/sdb /media/user/External/copy.img /media/user/External/status.log

You may then have luck with testdisk:

testdisk /media/External/copy.img

Follow the step-by-step prompts and you will be able to list the contents of the partition with the P key, assuming the disk is almost intact.

If the damage is more serious, you may try using RecuperaBit, described as:

A software which attempts to reconstruct file system structures and recover files. Currently it supports only NTFS.

RecuperaBit attempts reconstruction of the directory structure regardless of:

  • missing partition table
  • unknown partition boundaries
  • partially-overwritten metadata
  • quick format

Download the archive from GitHub and extract into a directory, then create a directory for the output and start the program with:

mkdir /media/user/External/recovered_files
cd [full path of recuperabit]
pypy main.py /media/user/External/copy.img -o /media/user/External/recovered_files -s /media/user/External/savefile.save

This will take some time. To check the list of partitions that can be saved use the following command:

recoverable

For recovering the partitions or folders, see the description of RecuperaBit.

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