Hi everyone,

I have a query regarding a Samsung M3 1TB external HD, which stored pictures, music studio project files, programs and plugins, music, .zip/rar files, and miscellaneous folders/files (I believe approx. 350-400GB of data in total, including the Samsung utilities pre-loaded when I bought the drive). I accidentally performed a partial clone of my computer's hard drive to this disk (I pointed to the wrong Samsung drive in the options - should have been to the replacement HD I'd bought for the failing PC drive), using HDD Raw Copy Tool - I cancelled the process when I realised my mistake shortly after, but now the drive can't be read when connected to my PC, and in Windows Disk Management, it shows the drive as having a partition of 100MB marked as System Reserved, and some 930GB of "unallocated space". I have used TestDisk to see if I could at least view what's on there - it indicates "Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged." (don't know if that's due to the cancelled cloning process?). I would like to know how possible it is to restore all of the data that was there before my mistake, and whether there is anything I can do with data recovery software??

Having read through the forum here for a few days now, I'm loathe to do anything to minimise my chances of getting the data back, which is why I only ran the TestDisk Advanced check, and I'm not sure of what the partitioning setup would have been before this - I used the drive straight out of the box when I bought it a year ago to store my files.

And please note, I'm dealing with my feeling of my own utter stupidity separately...

Depending how much of the copy was written, it could be possible to return your data, but if important information such as file records have been overwritten you could be looking at a signature based recovery, which I am sure will return a majority of your data, but will be without original file name and path.

Im assuming its an NTFS formatted disk, try demo if getdataback for NTFS. If it fails to return structured data then you need to look into a RAW recovery based on file signatures.

Thanks hddguy - I'm currently running TestDisk and doing a deeper search on an image file - hopefully the loss won't be too significant.

I have an additional question - I've read other people's stories on here where they've been able to restore their drives in similar situations, but accidental formatting rather than cloning...is there a difference in terms of what happens to a disk?

Accident formatting would only alter the partition table information that stories all the files name, now cloning would overwrite the data on the drive completely. Like a full level format which will take long time. Now depending on when the clone started from the drive, some of the data might be recoverable, and others not.

Thanks ShaneWard - so cloning makes things more difficult to retrieve...that's not a comforting thought...guess that explains why TestDisk couldn't repair the filesystem?