DiskWarrior Preview shows files but corrupted

[blackjack.304]

Hi,

I have 1 TB WD My Passport SE which had lots of data. I accidentally deleted the HFS+ partition. I followed the testdisk and pdisk tutorial (Link) to restore the partition table (partition does not mount after creating new partition using pdisk) and tried to recover the data using DiskWarrior after that.

Diskwarrior rebuilds the partition and I can see the exactly same directory structure as it was earlier. However, if I try to copy some files from preview mode, it actually copies corrupted files. the content of the file is not readable. (for e.g. if i try to play some mp3 file, it plays some weird song which is not the same song as the filename, photo files can not be opened by preview - it shows corrupted file).

Can't I copy any files at the DiskWarrior Preview stage? do I have to wait until the entire rebuild process is completed? what If Diskwarrior completes the rebuild process, but the files are still corrupted?

 

[Detrius]

Personally, I would have used gpt instead of pdisk, since your hard drive likely had a GUID Partition Table on it to begin with, but that's not particularly important.

If there *was* a GPT on it, you could potentially recover from the copy of the partition table at the end of the disk just by running "gpt recover /dev/disk<number>", and you could likely still do this, even though you've created a new Apple Partition Table (old PowerPC stuff) already, since neither MBR or APT would overwrite the GPT at the end of the disk.

Regardless, this isn't likely to fix your issue, unless testdisk was wrong about where the volumes are actually located (and it usually isn't). If the files are good, you absolutely should be able to get them from the DiskWarrior preview.

The next thing to try would be to run Data Rescue 3, and let it do its long scan.

One additional detail for people who find this by searching in the future: create a disk image of the original drive with one of gddrescue, dd, R-Linux, R-Studio, etc... anything that makes a byte copy of the drive. Attach the image using "hdiutil attach image.dmg -shadow". Make all your fixes/changes against that, since everything you change goes into the shadow file, and you have no risk of doing further damage to your data.