June 26th, 2013, 14:31
Hello I have an issue I am looking for help with.
my friend has a hard drive where she stored all pictures.
it is an external seagate goflex passport drive. it was formatted on windows with NTFS file system. she has about 10 thousand pictures on it in separate folders by date, occasion, etc.
then she got a mac and decided to reformat the drive to HFS+ so it works on mac. She did it and of course without backing up the data. so NTFS partition was formatted, but nothing was overwritten.
she brought drive to me. I used windows tools like Getdataback, stellar phoenix ntfs, icare data recovery, studio-r ntfs to recover the data and all those programs did recover all files with folder structure, however when I try to open any of the files it says data format is not recognized in windows. I tried opening recovered files on mac also with no avail. it gives similar message that files are corrupt.
Then I tried to recover with mac tools I used wondershare data recovery and it recovered files, but in raw format. All pictures open ok. however there is no folder structure.
I wonder if somehow data was encrypted after formatting to HFS+. or maybe there is some other issue. perhaps anyone can give me some suggestions on how to recover files with folder structure?
June 26th, 2013, 14:55
If folder structure is there that would mean MFT is intact
if you cannot open files from folder structure after recovering but can find files by raw recovery that would probably mean some FS constants you chose are wrong
Probably cluster or sector size you selected(or program detected) is incorrect
I guess some manual work is required here, if you want to do it yourself you better start learning NTFS FS internals
Just do a drive copy before you play with it