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To avoid XY problem, here's the background of the problem I am facing...

I have an external hard drive which should have hundreds of files and suddenly, all of them disappeared (I have no idea why).

I am trying to use ntfsundelete to recover these files. The reason I think ntfsundelete is not scanning the entire partition is because it has almost 1TB and ntfsundelete output lists just 255 inodes (0 potential recover) and it finishes very quickly.

If I mount the partition and check the number of inodes using df, following is the output:

nicolas@homelab:~$ df -ih /media/nicolas/HD_EXTERNO
Filesystem     Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1        932M    31  932M    1% /media/nicolas/HD_EXTERNO

I tried running ntfsundelete:

sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sdc1

and

sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sdc1 --scan

and got the same result:

Files with potentially recoverable content: 0

I am using ntfsundelete, but I am accepting any recommendation, if there is any alternative tool I should try, please, let me know (even if it runs a windows).

If it was a hardware failure, is there any tool I can use to perform a health check?

Thanks in advance

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  • If nothing works you could try R-Studio Undelete: r-studio.com/?GIMCX000 Commented Jun 25, 2022 at 17:59
  • Typically best to use Windows tools for Windows & Linux tools for Linux. Did you mount with Windows and it set the hibernation flag, which prevents Linux NTFS driver from seeing the NTFS partition? You may be able to manually mount in read only mode, if so. Commented Jun 25, 2022 at 22:47
  • Actually, I never had it connected to my laptop before today, it belongs to my wife and her PC runs windows. I only mounted it on my Debian laptop to try to recover it. I found this winfr tool, it's running for hours now, hopefully it will resolve the problem. Commented Jun 26, 2022 at 2:33
  • You can try to mount read only. Change sdXY to your drive & partition: sudo mkdir /mnt/win & sudo mount -o ro /dev/sdXY /mnt/win Windows typically has fast start up on: askubuntu.com/questions/843153/… & askubuntu.com/questions/145902/… Commented Jun 26, 2022 at 3:27

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