Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

Alt wrote:

zack2213 wrote:Thanks for the information.

Maybe a dumb question, but how can the size of the partitions be so much bigger than the size of the hard drive.

It's hard to say without seeing the disk firsthand. That may be because of an error of the program or because the disk was a part of a compound volume like a RAID.

Probably, I didn't understand your question correctly. Did you mean that the total size of the partitions found on the disk is much larger than the disk itself? If yes, that's easy. Them are surely overlapping, and the same disk area may belong to several Recognized(!) partitions at the same time.

zack2213 wrote:Thanks for the information.

Maybe a dumb question, but how can the size of the partitions be so much bigger than the size of the hard drive.

It's hard to say without seeing the disk firsthand. That may be because of an error of the program or because the disk was a part of a compound volume like a RAID.

Thanks for the information.

Maybe a dumb question, but how can the size of the partitions be so much bigger than the size of the hard drive.

All depends what you're trying to achieve. If you want to recover all files that have ever been on the disk, the best way is to open all partitions one by one, sort the files by their extensions and recover all jpg files. Many of them will be corrupted or duplicates, but you won't miss anything.
If you want to recover files from some certain partitions that once were on the disk, open those that have close parameters like offsets, sizes and file system types, sort the files by their extensions and recover all jpg files.

I scanned an old laptop harddrive and I am trying to recover all of the pictures off of the drive. I have read most of the help files on this site, but I am still a little confused.

When I scanned the drive I got 3 green partitions, about 40 orange, and 40 red partitions. Under the extra files I found a lot of pictures and I successfully restored. Now I started looking at all of the orange files and they also contain many jpeg files. Are the files under each partition different? There has to be some repeated information, because the total of data far exceeds the total space on the drive.

My question is what is the best way to make sure you have all of the possible pictures and documents without opening up and restoring each partition, our is there an easier way?

Thanks in advance for anyone who can help me wrap my head around this.