Hello..

I have been looking around the web for a forum that might be of help to me. I decided to stop here first only because I have used HDDGuru products in the past, so I am presuming the forum would contain knowledgeable people.

I am in a bit of a problem with a HDD. It is completely my fault. This is not a question of drive failure, only human failure.

I have a Seagate 1TB FreeAgent external Drive which I intended to use as backup. I only purchased it 3 weeks ago, so it should be pretty healthy. Anyway, because I had so many other random 3.5" drives lying around, near failing, I ended up putting everything of value on this Seagate, and then, of course realized I had defeated the purposes of a "back-up" drive, and now needed to backup my drive that was to be my backup drive.

Of course, I never got around to doing this for the ensuing 2-3 weeks after purchase of the drive and transfer of my files.

I can tell you a good deal of information about this catastrophe, and what I am seeking is some sound advice. I know there are so many methods and applications which claim to do miraculous things, but I really have not touched it since this problem occurred yesterday.

OK, here we go:

Before my disaster, this was what my Seagate drive looked like when I ran fdisk -l



Without discussing how or why I made this mistake (trust me, I have beaten myself up way to much already), the following actions were taken by me on this drive which caused its damage:

1. Believing it was a USB pendrive (!!), I first formatted it as follows

mkfs.vfat (only the first 1500MB)
mkfs.ext3 (the remainder of the drive, so approximately 995+ GB were formatted as ext3.

2. Then, still not realizing I was tampering with my main storage drive, and having some problems with copying files to the "pendrive" (which was my Seagate), I started a dcfldd wipe on it. But my intelligence finally resumed as I noticed that the dd command was proceeding beyond 4000MB, and I knew something was amiss. I immediately stopped the dd command.

Since then I ran testdisk, which did find the NTFS partition, and then Photorec, which allowed me to recover 100,000+ files without directory structure or names. I stopped that process midway through because that was going to be of no use to me.

To aid in anyone's diagnosis or suggestion, after running Testdisk, here was the result:





So... I am here seeking any other assistance I might find. The main partition of value is the NTFS partition. I am currently in Linux, but will use any OS necessary to recover these files even if I only get 80% of them, I really need the directory structure and names of said files.

I purchased two one (1)-Terabyte external drives today to make this job easier, as I know I will need the space.

I realize that by wiping the first 4GB I have destroyed the MBR and the file table... but I also know that NTFS is unique in the way it has meta-data throughout the filesystem.

ANYONE....who could please offer some words, advice, tricks, hacks, magical spells, or incantations (I am open to anything), I would be greatly -- immensely -- appreciative.

Please let me know.... I am near a panic attack as it is.. I know this is my fault, and that only makes it worse.

Thanks,
Paul

You wipe your drive and fill it with 0's there is no magic to repair this one. You want back file structure, directories and file names. You best hope on this one now is raw recovery. You might be lucky and get back your data on this one but not the way you want it and then you will spend time to rename and refile all your data.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Hi, you can use Get Data Back NTFS and try to recover your files.
http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-products.htm

Bosse

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

How big did you think your pendrive is?

There is plenty of commercial software you can try, but all give different results and some can even be destructive so choose wisely. You will likely lose any form of directory structure you previously had, and potentially many files will be damaged or overwritten. The only sure way to ensure all the required data you need is to consult a professional. Alternatively, look for some good software and be prepared to spend a few dollars on decent software.

The first thing to be done is to buy in another 1TB drive and make a by sector clone copy of your original!!!!

Then you can mount the cloned drive in a system and run anything you want on it until you find a program which will give you the full file system & folder tree. There are many recovery utilities which have evaluation versions to try before you buy. If you find what you are looking for you should really recover to a 3rd drive.

Good luck!

i had good luck using easus and file scavanger on formated drives for the recovery. Both have the ability to display the file/folder tree , but in ur case ,like it was said before , ull most likely get data raw. U can still shift through them by the extension.

Easus and file scavanger are worthless. If you need a good software take the advice of getting Get Data Back for NTSF, R Studio, WinHex, and USF Explorer. Then you have a better chance to get your data back using these prorgam than using Easus and receiving 500 x's the files after a scan on this one. This will not produce the files you are looking for. Follow the advice choose wisely your software and invest in it so you can try and get your data back. You might have to purchase more than one software to do this one with and then that is another issue on this one. Money and how much you will need to pay for all the software that can do this for you. Weigh out this cost and the cost of a good DR company who has the necessary tools needed to do this work for you. Then you can see which one is better for you to proceed with and get your data back on this one. Realize that some software packages can run you 500 dollars and up when doing this type of work.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Mater of opinion i guess. Easus and scav worked good for me. I do however have R-Studio and several other programs as well. Didnt have to use em since easus did the job for me lately.

Hello everyone. I was going through my bookmarks and found one to this page and remembered that this was the thread I started back in February when I had a near total disaster with almost 1TB of data where I had inadvertently wiped the first 4GB of it and was hoping to get everything back including the file structure.

I doubt anyone has lost any sleep wondering what happened to me and my data, but I wanted to say thank you to everyone who posted because I did follow-p research on anything anyone suggested.

But the veritable messiah that week was what poehere suggested.. GetDataBack for NTFS. This product was amazing. I had to run it for 18 hours straight as it rebuilt my drive sector by sector... and my HP latptop was in danger of overheating. At the moment, I live in a studio, so without much choice, I had to spend the night in the studio with its two windows wide open in an effort to cool down the laptop. I slept in a overcoat, hat, gloves and a scarf and really didn't sleep much. But by 10:00am the next day, I could see every file on the recovered image.

Perhaps the only thing that didn't make it were about 3 or 4 bottomless directories... By bottomless I mean they went on forever, by repeating the structure over and over. I don't know if recovering a directory and having this happen is is commonplace, but it was annoying--but a small price to pay for getting 99% back of what I had thought for 3 days was gone forever. Anyway, just to describe these directories, when the drive was being rebuilt, a particular path several layers deep was corrupted, and for whatever reason could not be repaired completely by GETDATABACK, so when I examined the recoveredy image... the path or structure was similar to this: x:/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/folder5/folder6/folder7/folder4/folder5/folder6.... and on and on infinitely. When I finally had copied all the files out of these directories which were not corrupt (I got almost all of them), I had to reformat the entire drive to get rid of these endless directories because windows wouldn't touch them (file name to big or file didn't exist...something like that). Linux was able to delete one of them -- after about 45 minutes, so realizing that a reformat was probably the best idea that is what I did.

So that is my story. A happy ending too.. I recommend GETDATABACK NTFS highly. It had a pretty simple interface, and, one more thing... it didn't just perform some recovery without any input. To the contrary, it had a lot of different parameters which could be set so as to prioritize or best utilize information that was known about the drive and/or how it was damaged. Most if not every other software product I looked at and considered before this one had more of a "click here, cross your fingers, and hope things work out" type of setup. But GDB was respectful of the fact that every situation is different and users -- if they have information of value -- should provide some input. This way you increase your chances of having a high recovery rate or amount of data that is successfully recovered.

Next time anyone has an NTFS catastrophe... use this.. you will be very happy.

Take care,
Paul

Hi Paul, Thanks for comming back and telling us how things worked out for you. You know so many first time posters never bother!
Anyway, well done!

Yep, agree.

Thanks for the feedback

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Murphy was an optimist

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