How do I recover my data from an external drive?

[helpmydata]

So long story short, I was wiping my computer with dban and left the backup external drive hooked up. It only got to 0.01% after a split second and I stopped it. My problem now is that when I hooked it back up to my computer the drive wouldn't show up. When I checked drive management on windows, it showed all of the 1 TB drive as unallocated. After running some data recovery software it only 'recovered' 5 sections which all show up under my computer as a different letter with a few MB but no data in it so it was useless! I also ran a different recovery software that scanned for specific file types and it found all my pictures but wouldn't let me save them without buying it so I know my data is still all or mostly there! I'm asking for a solution to recover the drive completely or to transfer files off it onto my computer as a last resort. As a side note, it takes about 14 hours to scan the whole drive with recovery software. Thank you in advance!

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[sathyan]

Dont use recovery programs that write back into the same drive.
There are many Free recovery programs ,but not effective or satisfactory.
Do not use programs that make changes to the drive.
You have lost the Root Directory structure,but you should get most of your data(depending on the fragmentation) using descent recovery softwares.
R-studio is a paid recovery software , good and easy to use.
You will need another drive( if you do not have enough free space in your booting drive) to copy the recovered contents from this 1TB drive.
Use google and search .

[fzabkar]

Apart from the usual recommendation to clone your drive, sector by sector, and then work on the clone, I would suggest that you use a disc editor to examine the extent of the damage. I haven't used DBAN, but I would expect that it would have written a repeating pattern of bytes to the beginning of the drive. You should be able to determine where this pattern ends and your remaining data begins. I would then write zeros to this area so that your data recovery software wouldn't be distracted by it.

I would also locate the backup NTFS boot sector at the end of the drive (assuming that was the file system), and then use it to restore the NTFS boot sector at the beginning of the volume. The data within the boot sector could also be used to reconstruct the partition table in sector 0 (assuming an MBR partition type).

BTW, 14 hours for 1 TB drive works out to about 20 MB/s, which is a typical transfer rate for a USB 2.0 external drive. ISTM that a "split second" wouldn't have lost you too much data.