A colleague came last week telling me he had some problems whit his Laptop. It was slow an he suspected the harddisk getting to full. So he began deleting some stuff and now it is not working any more.

First thought: He deleted to much, but apparently the harddisk has some issues. I could not access the main partition, only had access to the restore partition. In Minitool Partition Wizard the partition was listed as RAW. So I did a CHKDSK resolving in read errors.

Next step tried the software testdisk. Also came up whit read errors. I can see the Partition and the Partition Name. It also tells me that it is an NTFS Partition. I tried to repair the MFT in Testdisk, but that told me that the MFT is correct (like the backup MFT and the Primary are the same). But than testdisk tells me that no files are found and the filesystem may be damged. What could be done now?

Now I am making a Block-Backup using testdisk. It is now at 0.33%

Oh.. It is a 500GB WD Blue. It has 3 Partitions on it, one Sytstem Reserved, one whit the restore and a big one whit Data.

This step wasn't a great idea.
As a result of the previous step

If the data has any value then look at a data recovery service. Take care and research each company you decide to go with.

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If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably don't fully understand the situation. ... Mr Kipling

https://www.mjm.co.uk/

It is not that important Data that he will spend lot of money on it. Now I am running Photorec from Testdisk, This tool just copy's every thing it finds on the disk, let's hope that there is much of his Data.