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.

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.

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...

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.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

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

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

First make a clone.

testdisk will do the job.

success