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So I think ignored too many of my computer's warnings and disconnected my external hard drive without properly ejecting it and now it seems the file system is corrupted. Are there any programs that can help me recover this data? I think the data should still be mostly intact and the drive didn't have any physical damage. Thanks for the help.

I'm using a mac, but I also have access to windows. I've tried using testdisk and it is able to find these partitions:

Disk /dev/rdisk1 - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - 1953458176 sectors
 Partition               Start        End    Size in sectors
HPFS - NTFS                 2048  786098175  786096128 [skinny]
HPFS - NTFS                 2048 1953458175 1953456128 [skinny]
FAT32 LBA              786108645 1953449983 1167341339 [fat]
HPFS - NTFS            847538176 1953454079 1105915904

It appears that there are duplicate entries for the first partition but I'm not sure how to fix that within testdisk. The instructions it shows are "Use Up/Down Arrow keys to select partition. Use Left/Right Arrow keys to CHANGE partition characteristics: *=Primary bootable P=Primary L=Logical E=Extended D=Deleted"

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  • There are hundreds of similar questions already about data recovery. Please do a little research – recovery software exists en masse.
    – slhck
    Mar 2, 2014 at 7:53
  • @slhck I've tried using testdisk and now have a more specific question that I don't believe is still a duplicate.
    – Connor
    Mar 2, 2014 at 8:45

3 Answers 3

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Without you mentioning an OS, you can run chkdsk from within Windows or fsck from Linux to repair file system issues.

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If the partition is visible (you can access to it but not to the files) you can try out Unstoppable copier, it will take a long time to copy the corrupted files, but it will recover all the visible data.

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  • ^ do this pronto. Just incase the HDD has a fault in it. HDD's can die at anytime, especially with erros in them.
    – PathToLife
    Mar 10, 2014 at 12:12
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Your partition table/file system may be corrupted during unsafe removal of Disk. In that case recovering partition will fix the problem.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step
This recovery example for testdisk guides you through TestDisk step by step to recover a missing partition and repair a corrupted one.

You may also try following softwares
http://www.active-undelete.com/howto_recover_from_deleted.htm

Following software has the ability to preview partition data before recovery
www.partition-recovery.com
www.active-undelete.com
www.eassos.com

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  • thank you for your answer. I'm trying to use testdisk, but the guide they have doesn't cover the situation I've posted.
    – Connor
    Mar 8, 2014 at 1:24

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