DIY Data Recovery from unknown disk … (3)

By | October 20, 2016

DIY Data recovery software tested against an unallocated and un-initialized hard disk.

This is a continuation of a series, previous articles are here and here.

Background info and a more detailed analysis of the contents of the hard disk is here.

Disk Drill

I guess you can call this software good looking, it’s a matter of taste. I am using their free version. The website somewhat confuses me. It tells me I need to upgrade to Pro in order to be able to scan for lost partitions. But since there is no demo for the Pro version, how can I test this?

I have to look very hard for information on lost partition recovery, but according to the forum I use Deep Scan.

The down arrow expands and allows to select Deep Scan

Disk Drill volume and disk selection

 

Initially I am pessimistic as Disk Drill appears to be doing a RAW scan. But then I discover a ‘Partition’ folder in the folder tree. So, maybe it will pick up the NTFS partition of interest as well. We’ll see …

Disk Drill Deep Scan results

Disk Drill Deep Scan results

Disk Drill did not find the NTFS partition, apart from 3 files, all files were discovered using file carving. Since the goal of the test is to recover the complete directory tree, Disk Drill fails the test.

Also note the low number of files. As file carving only can discover files by ‘signature bytes’, the number of files detected is limited by the signature byte data base. File system based recovery tools were able to detect 200.000+ files.

To be continued …

 

 

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