Empty volume after windows upgrade

[dunkinnuts]

Hi,

I have a volume that contains a large amount of documents and lots of directories very well nested. I have been using this volume with no issues for a couple of years on Windows 7. I recently formatted and installed Windows 10, with the volume being on a seperate drive and completely untouched during the process.

Using the exact same version of veracrypt (portable) as well as the newest version when I mount the volume it shows as completely empty! It accepts the password.

I have run testdisk and can very slowly recover files, whilst it seems that most (if not all) are there I can't just let testdisk run as it gets stuck going down directories of raw glitchiness. There is a tonne of folders/files that look to be raw bytes converted to unicode e.g. full of chinese characters or just ., they prevent testdisk from automatically recovering all the files.

Is there a way to just fix the volume? It seems everything is still there its just not reading properly?

Alternatively is there a way to get testdisk to ignore anything that has non ascii symbols in its name?

[Philip Smith]

I would take the drive out get an appropriate cable and take it to a computer that has windows 7 on it, recover the files to an external usb hard drive.

Theoretically that should at least get your files back, which is the important thing.

Then put the drive back and remake you partition or volume using the installed windows 10 and put files back.

Now you also see the importance of always having a 100% verafied backup.

I would also NOT use any windows utilities like checkdisc or testdisc except as a last resort. Try recovering files first.

[Enigma2Illusion]

This is going to be a Microsoft ownership and/or permission issue likely due to the user ID number (SID) is different than the old user ID number the previous Windows OS was using for your user name since you performed a fresh install of Windows OS.

You may need to set the permissions and ownership on the dismounted VeraCrypt drive/partition. Then mount the VeraCrypt volume. Set the permissions and ownership of all the files within the file container.

Different folders can have different permissions and ownership permissions for user accounts in Windows that are inherited when you place a file in that folder.

Google search Windows permissions and ownership on files.

NOTE: Given you used a data recovery software to restore some files, I am not sure if that impacted the ability to set the permissions/ownership on the "missing" folders/files since they may have been overwritten by the recovery software.