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File exists on drive, but contents doesn't show up hex editor

Posted: 25 Sep 2019 20:03
by TaupeRanger
I have a hard drive which I'm trying to manually recover some data from using HxD. I opened the drive, and then saved the entire thing to a separate file (it's about 80GB, and the drive itself is old and slow). It's an old Windows install. In one of the folders, I find a .dat file which contains a specific string I'm looking for. I see this file when using Windows Explorer, and when I open it in HxD, I see the string. But when searching the entire 80GB file of the entire drive for that same string, it does not appear. What would cause this? I am using the same encoding when opening the file from Explorer, and when searching the saved drive.

Re: File exists on drive, but contents doesn't show up hex editor

Posted: 26 Sep 2019 05:51
by Maƫl
If you created the disk image using HxD and it has the right size (same as your imaged hard disk), then it should contain the string.

It might be that the file was compressed or encrypted, though, so the raw disk dump and the file would not contain the same raw data.