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I made a backup of a bootable raspberry pi usb flash drive using disk utility on a mac. Apparently the disk image is corrupt and I no longer have the original USB flash drive. I have tried to see if I can fix the issue using TestDisk on my mac to no avail. I still have the contents of the flash drive (files) and also wanted to see if i could recreate the boot drive from these files

I am hoping someone can help me figure out if I can fix it and how. I appreciate any help I can get. Thanks!

Here are the testdisk errors found:

Main Screen of TestDisk

Intel partition

GPT partition

Tim
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The Mac and Disk Utility is completely unable to make a backup of a bootable RPi USB drive... it's a different filesystem. If you had used dd instead of Disk Utility, you might have had a different outcome; dd is not ideal for backups, but chances are reasonably good that if you'd done it correctly you would have something you could use.

So - that's past, and all you can do now is chalk this up to experience. In the future, if you want a good backup system for your RPi (as long as it's running some flavor of the RPi OS), you should use image-backup - a part of the image-utils "bundle". There are several answers here that describe features, how it works, and where to download it - this one for example.

Seamus
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If you used a Mac (or Windows) tool you DON'T have a backup because neither understands Linux file systems and can't backup MBR disks.

At best you might be able to mount on a Linux computer and recover some of your data.

ONE backup is a false sense of security and an untested backup is worse.

Milliways
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