After accidentally repartitioning my external harddrive (I still maintain that I clicked "No", the computer was just out to get me), I began looking for a way to recover my data.
(The repartitioning was done using Windows 10 media creation tool, using quick partition/format. The process created a new, 32-GB partition, and wrote some data to it).
Since not all my files are common, I don't want to rely on software that scans for known file signatures.
Luckily for me, I discovered (using Active partition recovery) that there are some MFTs which seem intact, and considering their size (932 MB), I expect they contain references to the backup of my previous laptop. However, I've been unable to extract the MFT using this tool.
Seeing as the MFT is (hopefully) all there, I was hoping it can be used to find some of the data on my harddrive, and verify which files are intact, and which are missing/corrupt (since some data was written after the repartitioning).
So bottom line, is there a way to:
- Recover the MFT, and
- Find the surviving files and list those that did not survive?
Being a layman, I can only forsee one possible problem, which is the tool not knowing where to start searching for the files, if the previous partition tables are gone and the pointers in the MFT are relative to the start of the partition...
