59 mb of the beginning of a 81GB fat32 partition overwritten

[ans]

this is what i did:

dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sda3 bs=8M
^C8+0 records in
7+0 records out
58720256 bytes (59 MB) copied, 6.53414 s, 9.0 MB/s

here /dev/sda3 is my 81 gb fat32 partition which was around 65 gb full, /dev/sdc is my usb driv
all the directories are gone except 4 root directories which contain a few files which i doubt are corrupt and contain no subdirectories.
my root partition is full of files with cryptic names.
Is the any way to recover the data ??

ps: the partition contained all the work that i had done in the last 5 years in college and my brothers work and pictures etc.
so obviously the data is very imp to me

[BlackST]

At this point , if every other option fails, only a RAW recovery by signature can help you. Good luck.

[ans]

Could you please elaborate on what the other options are?
Can RAW recovery recover all my files or is it useful for locating a few specific files.
How much does it cost?
Isn't the fat table backed up somehere in which case recovering the fat can recover all my files?

Thanks for you help

[hybris2k]

A RAW recovery is basically a file signature search. It scans the drive for known strings of data that resembles files you might want, JPGS or MP3 for example. FAT does not keep a backup. Guess that was a part of New Technology in NTFS (New Technology File System).

Anyways, depending on what kind of files you are after there are different tools for RAW recovery. If you need pictures you can start with http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
which is free and very good.

There is no magic in RAW recovery, it is time consuming and rarely produces near-perfect results Just make sure you don't write anything else to the drive.

If you just feel that you want it done by someone else, every data recovery company can do it for you.

Good luck!

[msurgeon]

If in fact you overwrote 59gb of your 81gb partition then the only hope for recovery is if some of your lost files reside in the last 22gb of non-overwritten file space. You have no doubt lost the rest and no recovery tools will help after the file space has been overwritten.

[hybris2k]

Umm, it says 59 MB, not GB, luckily

[msurgeon]

Mea culpa. Need new glasses.

[littlendian]

You can probably do more than just raw recovery on your hard drive, although a raw recovery is probably the cheapest option. There's probably free software that you can download that will do raw recoveries.

A DR professional (company or individual) with good knowledge of FAT32 file systems can still get file names, time stamps and other bits of information for certain files and folders in your scenario . With 59MB of data you have overwritten way past both FAT tables and the Root so you will only be able to get file attributes and names for the files stored in subfolders (some of them may have also been overwritten). The result of the recovery will depend on the cluster size of the FAT32 partition and on the size of your files. If you have lots of small files that did not fragment then you will get a good recovery. Big files will most likely be fragmented and you won't get a good recovery on them... but depending on the file type and the capabilities of the DR company/professional doing the recovery you may be able to get them back in a working state via file-specific recovery techniques.

These type recoveries are very tedious and time consuming and most of it has to be done manually (reconstructing FAT partitions is very challenging) So if you are not worried about file names and other attributes, and you only want to get some pictures back, go for a raw recovery. If you need those files back with file attributes and names then be prepared to pay a high price for them.

If you are gonna try to do any of this yourself, do as it has been recommended many times in this forum and make a copy of that hard drive (use dd the right way this time!!) and work on the copy.

[fzabkar]

Isn't the fat table backed up somehere in which case recovering the fat can recover all my files?

There are two copies of the FAT. Unfortunately FAT #2 is located immediately after FAT #1. :-(

[ans]

Thanks for all all your help

Unfortunately its not a few specific files that i am looking for
but all the files and directories that i had accumulated in the last 5 years
(1 subdirectory for every course that i had done lots of code ,pdf files,softwares,pictures)

I guess though i'll still try raw recovery and see what i can salvage.

Can you suggest some free raw recovery tool ?