Accidentally converted basic disk to dynamic disk

[labtech]

You know the "Table of Contents" in a book? If you rip the table of contents page out of the book, then a reader does not know what each page is, to what chapter is belongs to and so on.

In a drive formatted as NTFS, the "table of contents" is the MFT. Since MFT is gone (seems to have been overwritten), then no file structure of the say partition is possible. Only RAW/generic name recovery is feasible.

Makes sense?

[DistortedVision]

I noticed if I right click on the drive it gives me the option to convert back to basic drive. Would doing this make matters worse? I think you are correct there was something wrong with the partition before I did the conversion.

[DistortedVision]

Also wondering if I sent to a professional data recovery company would they only be able to do a generic name recovery like I can do in R-Studio?

[pcimage]

Also wondering if I sent to a professional data recovery company would they only be able to do a generic name recovery like I can do in R-Studio?

We can take a look, if we can't do any better we'll send it back with no fee

[fzabkar]

I can recover files with R-Studio I've not fully investigated it. All the filenames have been renamed so I need to continue with it. Not all the jpeg files were recovered. I was hoping to get the directory tree etc ie the partition as it was but this does not look feasible does it?

Here are two examples of MFT records:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/temp/MFT_example.jpg
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/temp/MFT_example_2.jpg

If all such records have been wiped, then there will be no file/folder information. The best you could do would be to examine your JPEGs for text information such as camera model, date/time stamps. You could then sort the recovered files according to these data.

Here are some ideas for sorting and identifying raw files:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/After_Using_PhotoRec