Partition recovery help?

[Mcooper]

Hi Everyone!

I've got a dilemma.

I was using a restoration command (dd) in Linux to restore a backup onto another hard drive. Mistakenly I ended up "restoring" to the source hard drive. Luckily almost no data was written but the drive was changed from a 1TB partition to the partitions of the backup source.

I am wondering what tool might be best to recover the partition I need with all those files.

Also would it make sense I need to delete all of the partitions on the drive ebcause that's all that recovery software seems to pick up right now.

[DanR]

There are plenty of tools out there.

R-Studio
Get Data Back
'Disk Internals

You do have to pay for these software packages, but I hear you can 'obtain' them from some magical websites.

[hddguy]

I hear you can 'obtain' them from some magical websites.

The software you mention is developed by clever guys who put a lot of work into what they do. Since I use a lot of the software daily its only fair that I use them with a legit license.

You should not encourage piracy, it undermines all the hard work and time that goes into the software products that are essential in this game...

[fzabkar]

Internal hard drives have a typical data transfer rate of 100MB/s. This means that even 1 second is enough time to destroy your file system, not just your partition information. Therefore I expect that raw recovery will be your only hope.

I would suggest that you clone your corrupted drive, sector by sector, and then work on the clone. In order that your software will not be confused by the presence of a second file system, I would perform a sector-by-sector comparison of your corrupted drive against your original target drive. Note the LBA of the first difference, and then zero fill all sectors prior to this LBA.

[drc]

What was the original file system, and how much data did you copy before stopping it?

[jim]

First make a clone.

testdisk will do the job.

success