Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Because Ronnie had reported the successful recovery of over 500 photos with Photorec after the Great Crash of his hard drive in 2014, I offered to try to recuperate pictures on the HD of a friend in the States whose computer expert had said it would be impossible to retrieve anything… and yet it contained pictures that were invaluable to her. She mailed me the drive and, after it had spent the night in the refrigerator (NOT the freezer) I went to work.
Windows 10 on a 4-year-old Toshiba laptop kept offering to format the two partitions (one Windows RE-Store, the other, apparently, system and data, in a roughly 10-90% partition setup of the 500 Go), but would then say partitioning was impossible. The disk utility of Lubuntu 14.04 (on a Samsung Netbook that dates back to 2007) didn’t even find the disk. With nothing to lose, I googled testdisk and went to the official download page at http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download where the latest version is 7.0. I downloaded the testdisk-7.0.linux26.tar.bz2 and copied it to my home folder on the Samsung. I then used the terminal to unzip it with sudo tar xvf testdisk-7.0.linux26.tar.bz2 which created a folder called testdisk-7.0, inside of which, among other things, was testdisk_static and photorec_static.
OK, I thought I’d start with testdisk and both partitions came up green, although the drive still wasn’t recognized by the disk utility. (I admit that I didn’t go into the log or try to understand anything…) Instead, I then went directly to photorec (everything is done with the command line) : cd testdisk-7.0, then sudo ./photorec_static. I got a page asking me which drive I wanted to recuperate things from : I chose the Windows one first, but, after about six hours, I stopped that and started over.
I won’t bore you with my umpteen tries that lasted overnight and beyond (until everything got too hot to work), BUT I finally realized that I could use the options.
So: cd testdisk-7.0, sudo ./photorec_static, password, new page, select partition, new page, type of partition selected (in my case FAT, etc.), new page, where do you want to save the recuperated files? It suggests doing it within the testdisk folder, so I hit c (to show that that was correct).
At some point, at the bottom of the page where the first option (Proceed) is automatically selected, there is the possibility to choose Options (arrow key + Enter) and, there, to choose NOT to disable Brute Force (in other words to enable it), Enter. Then you can move to the File Opt where you can deselect everything by hitting b (I think, I’m doing this from memory because the Netbook refuses to search the hard drive any further…). All the X’s in the boxes next to file types disappear and you can navigate down the list to choose what you really want, in my case JPG and DOC + Enter. THEN you can return to Proceed (with the left arrow key) and press enter.
With just two file types selected, the search was much faster: 465 hours instead of 1654, or something else unbelievable, were announced. Any time you want to Stop the search, all have to do is press enter because STOP is highlighted, and go through the rigamarole of Do you really want to Stop, etc. The best part is that the next time you use photorec, you will be asked whether you want to resume the search you already started. Y + Enter. Select where you want the recovered files to be stored (c for correct). And off it goes again…
What do you actually recover? If you start with all the file types, you’ll find yourself with 50 GB or so of things in several different folders named recup_dir.1, through recup_dir.34, etc. depending on how many times you try things. Most of the .doc files I recovered were system files (one even weighed in at 480 MB – no hope at all of opening it with LibreOffice), several were .db, which I thought might be genealogy tables, but when I tried to open them in both Linux and Windows, I got a message they were system files. Unfortunately, at least half or more of the .jpg files were in fact pictures from ads, carpets, pants, dresses, etc., of absolutely no interest. BUT 190 bona fide photos were recovered, although some of them are doubles.
As to the huge recup_dir folders, there seemed to be no way to delete them. Even sudo nautilus wouldn’t let me get rid of them. Finally (thanks to something I read in Full Circle recently), I tried sudo su and nautilus and, at last I could erase them and recover some space in my Netbook’s hard drive.
To sum it all up, I guess that the keys to success with Photorec are obstinance, patience and discernment. Tomorrow, I’m mailing my friend a full CD of her lost pictures and that is what I would call a triumph: the triumph of Lubuntu, photorec, and sheer persistence.