Recovering lost files from a formatted external drive

Nhyiraba Bismark

12/17/22, 5:12 PM

I was trying to make a bootable USB drive.

I started it and then became aware that I had the wrong drive selected /dev/sdb I let it run, and then became aware that I had the wrong target.

I meant to target Toshiba sub drive and my external drive was also Toshiba drive which is my external hard drive containing 7 years of memories.

After the process was complete and I realized my mistake, I was still able to mount and access all the files on my external drive, but gparted shows the file system as iso9660.

I rebooted my system and now instead of my external drive showing on the desktop as (its former label) it shows up as something else and it is inaccessible.

Where do I start?

The drive is a 1.8 TB. I am attempting data rescue with gparted, and I assume the scanning process will take 6 years or so on my ancient hardware.

I can not describe how losing these files will make me feel, but I am sure you know. Is the data still there? Please help if you can.

0 + 3

partitioning

boot

dual-boot

mount

hard-drive

oldfred

12/17/22, 6:15 PM

How were you writing ISO. Basically whatever data was in the size of ISO, or 4GB is gone as overwritten. Was entire drive one large partition? If not you can easily recover the other partitions, but not first. Was drive gpt or MBR? If gpt it will also have backup partition table at end of drive, but partition table at beginning of drive whether MBR or gpt is gone. First clear MBR whether drive was MBR or gpt with protective MBR. https://askubuntu.com/questions/939230/formatting-a-usb-stick-unable-to-operate-usb/939266#939266 & https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb#Re-use_the_pendrive

Nmath

12/17/22, 6:23 PM

Overwritten data is unrecoverable. Your instructions overwrote the header which is like the "table of contents" for everything on the volume. Some files might be recoverable with advanced data recovery software like testdisk or photorec. Any further action you take can result in further data loss so STOP using it until you can make a bit-for-bit copy. If you are not an advanced user, take the disk to a data recovery specialist. Backups are ESSENTIAL. In this case, you are to blame, but hardware can fail any time without warning. Because you don't have backups, this was inevitable. BACK UP

Nmath

12/17/22, 6:40 PM

"*I am attempting data rescue with gparted, and I assume the scanning process will take 6 years or so*" - I don't know what you believe you are doing here, but gparted can't find files if a volume header was overwritten. You could be making the problem worse and you could be overwriting everything that wasn't already destroyed. If this data is valuable to you, I'd strongly suggest that you stop messing with it and take it to someone who knows what they are doing in this regard

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Recovering lost files from a formatted external drive

TH: การกู้คืนไฟล์ที่สูญหายจากไดรฟ์ภายนอกที่ฟอร์แมตแล้ว

RO: Recuperarea fișierelor pierdute de pe o unitate externă formatată

RU: Восстановление потерянных файлов с отформатированного внешнего диска

VI: Khôi phục các tệp bị mất từ ổ đĩa ngoài được định dạng

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