One of my friends had a problem with his portable hard disk (WD10TMVW) which appeared to be an issue with a corrupted partition table. It was not detected by Windows. Fortunately it was detected by Fedora, but it was not auto mounted. It was appeared only in /dev directory.
I tried many data recovery tools to retrieve the data, but all the tools failed, many of them even failed to recognize the disk. However "TestDisk", in fact photo_rec was able to detect the disk and recover few files. after recovering few files, it went to an endless loop. I believe this was happened due to some bad sectors.
So I went though their forum and found out that editing a status file (i.e. photorec.ses ) you can start recovery from a given sector. this status file is used by the tool to resume previously stopped recovery session.
The second line of this file keeps the last processed sector.
If you encounter the endless loop, you can change the highlighted value and restart the recovery. You must choose Y when the tool asks to continue previous session.
2nd line of photorec.ses generated by photo_rec:
/dev/sdc partition_none,255,blocksize,512,fileopt,fat,disable,ext,disable,options,paranoid,keep_corrupted_file_no,wholespace,search,status=ext2_off,185497,inter
Whenever you encounter the endless loop, you have to do this modification and restart the recovery.
So, eventually I was able to recover most of the data from the disk, thank to this great tool.
Home page of TestDisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
