I accidentally formatted a Windows 7 hdd in a Synology NAS to Linux EXT 4 and now try to recover as much as possible. Testdisk showed me 2 Linux partition and 1 NTFS and 1 unallocated drive. In the NTFS drive I ve found a system repair image (seems the recovery drive). Photorec didn't find any data in the unallocated part. Ran Active@ Partition Recovery and this tool found 103 GB data (program files, documents,...) in this unallocated part. Now saved this data onto an usb-stick, but the stick is not recognised by my windows. When I run testdisk on the usb-stick I can see the folders and data, it all seems OK. But not sure why I can t open this in Windows. Any idea why? To much corrupted files?

After this I ran Active@ Data Recovery on the unallocated part of the original hdd. This tool give me +400 GB of data (original HDD is only 250GB). It sounds impossible to reconstruct the data of the hdd based on this +400GB of recovered data.

Any idea why the recovered results from Active@ Partition Recovery can t be accessed? What would be the best approach to reconstruct the hdd to its original state (with Windows 7 and Office on it)?

Thx!

I would clone the drive, sector by sector, and then work on the clone.

Otherwise can you see your missing data partition with Partition Find & Mount?
http://findandmount.com/

If not, my next step would be to examine your drive with a disc editor (eg DMDE freeware) in readonly mode.

http://dmde.com/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

You mean making Win 7 start again with MS Office working as it was?

I doubt it's possible to do that now, unfortunately: http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=28547&p=196563#p196563

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• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

Partition Find & Mount didn t find anything unfortunately.

Since the results (files, folders and size) of Active@ Partition Recovery seemed plausible I hoped I would have been able to just paste the recovery on the HDD like that. But since this is not the case I suppose I will have to download the software again and install everything from scratch and add the recovered documents afterwards.

I ve tried to find the product keys in the system files recovered with Active@ Data Recovery, but the tool couln t find anything...

Why don't you use software as R-Studio or UFS Explorer?
They are the best you can find on the net.

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My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI#MxP2J6ZNqXDcrX40I8MoQQ

In my previous topic I d been advised to use 4 different programs, with DMDE and Find and Remount being mentioned twice. So I ve tried one of these. I d also found people advising Recuva, TestDisk, Photorec, ...

I do appreciate all feedback, but for people without any knowledge in this field it s very difficult to decide on which tool best to use in which situation without specific explanations. I would have been very happy if there were some manuals available describing the concept of data recovery and the principles, advantages and disadvantages of each tool.

I was happy with the output of Active@ File Recovery, but when I dig into it I see that some recovered files are shown up to 10 times, which makes it impossible to easily put back te data nor recover the software, product keys,...

When you say R-Studio and UFS Explorer are the best I can find on the net, are you saying that these will only recover the files once? Are they faster? In what way are they different to other tools?

Thanks for your feedback!

R-studio and UFS explorer are able to recover also folder structure if filesystem is not completely gone.

Try R-studio first...
In case you still don't see folders you can try to do a full scan with it, then you should see folders.
If folders are still not showed then the only way to recover is via raw (inside extra files)

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My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI#MxP2J6ZNqXDcrX40I8MoQQ