Shit yeah!!! Tried to backup my 4GB SD Card to my 2 TB USB HDD. It seems the FAT Table has been overwritten and whatever damage 4% of 2GB can do. When you stop laughing I would appreciate any advice because I have everything on this drive.

Seems it is now a FAT32, 3.68GB capacity with 1.43GB free so hopefully the rest of the 2TB is there somewhere.


The Sucker

Need more information.

1. What did you use to copy with?
2. What tools do you have at your disposal?
3. How technical are you? Just to be safe, I suggest getting a full sector-by-sector clone of your 2TB drive as the first step.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Exactly.

I pulled the leads on the 2 TB Samsung Story Station Drive when I realised what was happening but it looks like the FAT table is gone. Most important thing is that most of my backups are in single 'DriveImage XML' files although one is multifiles and SD card images are other formats.


1. See Spildit.
2. Internet. I am using WinXP3.1 on a dual core processor.
3. IT expert in early 1990's (Basic, Fortran, C, Cobol, Pascal, DOS Batch Files, Assembler, Unix, dBase). Understood HDDs then but left behind by the change in technology.
(I will clone disk on the same model drive).

@flywire, was the external drive formatted as FAT32 or NTFS? If NTFS, then it will have no FAT tables.

The way that I would approach this problem would be to locate the last sector (X) on your SD card and then confirm whether the same sector on the HDD has identical contents. If so, then I would write zeros to the range of sectors from 0 to X. This will prevent your data recovery software from becoming confused by the SD card image. Of course you would do this on a clone rather than the patient HDD.

I would then search for MFT records, assuming the file system was NTFS.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

My candidate identical clone says NTFS so I am sure this is what it is.

Doubtful.
OK sounds like a plan.

I can Google but a little knowledge is probably dangerous so before I make another rapid decision I would appreciate someone hold my hand for a moment:

What software to clone drive?
How to compare what of SD Card was copied?
How to zero?
How to recover from MFT records?
What sort of success can I expect?


flywire

btw How do I backup SD Card with HDD Raw Copy Tool?

How to backup card: OK I can see that I should have written it to file not disk

yes it is great to have 20/20 hindsight, thou rarely helpful.

to clone a disk easily, use a bootable clonezilla. very easy, just boot and read steps. make sure to have a big'nuff external USB connected HDD or a second Internal that you wont mix up.




grab HxD freeware
rightclick and run as administrator
choose Extras, open disk
open both the SD card and the hard disk, tile and visually compare.


in HxD simply press zero be careful, as you would make permanent changes to whatever you write. I would make another backup and keep it elsewhere.


hmmm.. chicken I'll let someone else have that one

How long is a piece of string? I really don't know, this sort of thing is a try and see deal, but what Fzabkar suggested should give good results I think.

Sorry:
I have tried both HDD Raw Copy Tool and Clonezilla with an identical 2TB USB drive and both have done the same thing. They have copied the 4GB SD Card partition from the corrupted 2TB USB Disk to the 2TB sacrificial disk and not copied the bare metal data.

Has anyone done this who can give me the exact command?

(BTW After running Puran file recovery for 24hrs it lists nearly all files as 100% recoverable outside of the 4GB partition so I am hopeful that this will work.)


Regards

When you run the clonezilla bootable CD, you must choose the correct option s that I thought were labelled quite clearly.
I am unable to run a PC with a disc right now to check what they are but can tomorrow if no-one else chimes in with a solution

Much appreciated. (It seems to me that the simple interface has been set up for partitions rather than disks.)


Regards