Question: I used TestDisk to recover files from an internal hard drive which I connected externally to another PC. ?With PhotoRec all the file names are wrong and the original folder structure doesn’t exist.
What can be done?
Answer: Photorec does do that, its one of the more annoying things about it, but its meant to recover files in scenarios where its more important to get the data.It often is able to rebuild images from fragments in situation where commercial software can’t. As such i tend to run recurva first (it preserves filenames) THEN testdisk in a recover scenario. (practically its “Load in another OS with a different file system driver implementation – windows for ext, linux for ntfs, testdisk, recurva then photorec)
You can’t recover the folder structure, but you may be able to rebuild the filenames off other data. There’s a section on photorec’s documentation that has some scripts that are useful for doing this sort of recovery, using exif and other metadata.