Hi,
I messed up my external hard drive through sheer idiocy.
I've been trying to get an old dos/win95 laptop up and running and have been playing with partition software to setup an mSATA to use as the main hard drive.
It seems that while trying to write an image to my mSATA i've somehow written the image to my external hard drive which was still plugged in. Reducing the size from 4TB to 4GB. It took me a while to realise what had happened, because I was concentrating on the mSATA not the external HDD and once I realised I almost had a full on meltdown, as there are baby photos & videos, wedding photos & videos which may not exist anywhere else anymore.
So i'm trying to find the best way of recovering the data. I've accepted there's no magic Undo button and i'm going to have to work to get my data back properly.
The image below shows the current state of my external hard drives. (I bought a new drive to help recover the data. This will double as a backup connected to a raspberry pi4b used as a NAS drive once i've sorted my mess)
I'm currently running EaseUS Data Recovery, scanning the drive for all my files. I ran this first on the 4GB partition and it found some files as RAW files, so some of the filenames make no sense and there's no folder structure. I'm worried though, that by having split the partition I might get fragmented files, so whilst I might recover a few things some will never be recoverable.
So my first thought to get around this is whether I extend the 4GB volume to the maximum size and see if this helps?
Any advice would be appreciated
Thanks
Jim