Greetings HDDGURU Forums,

Recently I set about to do a system restore of my 'C' OS drive. I use Acronis True Image for this, and is always performed from a bootable disk.

Well, somehow instead of setting the 'C' drive as the TARGET drive, I manage to accidentally set the TARGET drive for the restore to my external 'F' drive (a 1TB WD Passport). When I realized the restore was taking much longer than normal, and that the external WD drive was running (it usually never does unless it absolutely has to for some reason), I immediately canceled the restore process. I do a restore process so often that I seldom think about what's happening, and obviously I got sloppy with what check-boxes I was ticking.

My system is restored correctly now, but when I connect the external drive, it is not recognized. I suspect that about 3 or 4 Gigs were written to it, and moreover I would imagine my OS is seeing the drive as a system drive, if anything at all (I am guessing here, as I am not an expert).

What would be the best course of action for reversing this process? I know that whatever was overwritten in the process is gone forever, but what is now the best way to recover the remaining 900 some Gigs of data? Is there any way to change the status of the external drive so that it is recognized as not being a system drive, or recognized in some other way, and therefore I could see the files and folders which are on it, or will I have to undertake a full-blown data recovery?

I have R-Studio, but before I start trying to do something, I felt it would be wise to consult those who know more than I. Thank you

Yup...you are likely going to have to run a full scan with R-Studio and recover what you find to another drive, as you cannot write back to the original. Personally, I'd recommend getting a full clone of the overwritten drive first, just to be safe, but that is your choice. Odds are, you will have lost most of the original file structure and will be recovering RAW files.

Be prepared to spend several days going through the whole process and don't be surprised when R-Studio shows 5TB of data found on your 1TB drive. You should be able to filter that down to a more manageable amount, but you will likely need a 2TB drive or larger for your recovered data...based on your comment that the 1TB was almost full.

Good luck.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Yep, that's pretty much what I figured. Let the fun begin. Not sure I know exactly what you mean by RAW files. You mean a RAW file with no file structure ... as in I'll have to re-structure all the files I manage to recover into a new directory structure?

Excuse my ignorance on the matter, but I might think there would be a clever application that could repair the file structure -most of it anyway- so as long as the MFT wasn't overwritten. Wishful thinking?

MFT is quite close to the beginning of the drive, so very likely most of it is overwritten.
Raw recover means files are recovered by their signature, so no filename or folder structure any more.

_________________
Murphy was an optimist

Datarecovery in Belgium, Holland, France and Germany
Datarecoverytools http://www.drtools.eu

MFT typically sits around 3gb after partition start, so it all just depends on exactly how much got overwritten

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

Most of my disks I defrag with PerfectDisk, which places the MFT at the middle of the disk ... all except for this one

Already started scanning the drive. Thanks for all the replies.

There is usually a portion of the MFT at the middle of the drive, but it certainly will be incomplete.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Since there were thousands if not tens-of-thousands of files on the drive, it will be like looking for and identifying ten-thousand particular needles in a haystack. If that's the case, this is beginning to look bleak.

FWIW R-Studio seems to have analyzed and identified (3 days) the entire directory structure, complete with proper folder and file names. I'm amazed. Porting everything over to a 2TB HDD now. Recovery successful.

Did your external drive have only one partition prior to overwritting?

_________________
Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Zephyr out of the subject, i like your Nickname here really,,, reminds me with one of the Families

and good luck

_________________
Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein