HDD ExFat recovery

[Cozwin]

Hi everyone, was hoping some of the techy fellows on here could help me out.

My raid 1 500gb (1tb total) external HDD just died on me a week ago, it was ExFat in format and It went unallocated then RAW in windows, it happened when I ran linux on the same pc it was plugged into, so likely wrecked the boot sector, being an idiot it asked me to format so I made it fat32 and presumed I could get the files off with Getbackdata for NTFS, however it finds nothing. Using Photorec I can find files by type, such as jpg or w/e and these files are from that drive so I know the stuff is there, however I lose file names, and the file I am seeking is a txt file and it gives me 16,000 of them with generic names, which is the issue.

So I need to either be able to restore the old partition (been trying with testdisk but I don't understand it much) or restore files and keep the file name/structure so I can find it from the specific folder it wass in before, any ideas?

[Splash]

Hate to be That Guy, but... just restore from backup?

[Cozwin]

ha... yer, the file I need isn't in my second backup (the drive that died was my first)

[Steve]

How big is the file? Can you remember any of its contents? If you're really desperate and it is indeed a raw text I guess you could load up a live Linux CD and try something like:

strings /dev/[disk] | grep "some string probably unique to the file" > results.log

That assumes that exFat stored the file contiguously. If there's junk in between chunks of the file, but they're still close together, then using "grep -A100 -B100" would give you the 100 readable strings before and after "some string probably unique to the file". Use the "-i" flag on grep for case insensitivity.

This is completely untested and just popped out of my head. So no warranty. Also it'll be slow as hell (well actually provided the grep string is unique enough it'll just be however long it takes to read the entire disk).

[peterb]

You might find something of use here

http://www.runtime.org/

I haven't used their data recovery products, but I have used some of their others, which do what they say. They do need a bit of expertise/understanding to use them properly.

Personally, I'd clone the disk/partition you want to recover to a second disk, and then try to recover the data on the clone. The rationale is that should you mess up the recovery, you can always clone again from the original and start again.