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ndp
Asked: 2012-05-19 13:59:56 +0800 CST

Save data after accidental dd format

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as embarrassing as it sounds I managed to dd a debian iso to an external hd instead of my usb pen drive.

now my 1.5 tb western digital has 1 700mb partition named debian and the rest is unallocated space.

if I understand correctly how dd works the first 700mb of data in the disc are lost since they have been overwritten.

is there any way to save the rest?

//the disk was ntfs partitioned

disaster-recovery dd data-loss

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This depends on how the data was stored on the disk. In most cases it will be fragmented, which means that a significant larger count of files could be corrupted as parts of them were overwritten.

    To put it more precicely: Everything which had extents in the first 700MB will be (at least partly) corrupted.

    However there are good chances to recover some of the files, check out testdisk and if this does not do it you might give photorec a try.

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  2. I would recommend downloading UFS Explorer to run a scan and see what's recoverable from the disk. As with most data recovery processes, make sure that you don't write anything else to the disk. UFS Explorer works on Mac and Linux, but I prefer running it from Windows. You should be able to scan and produce a list of files and possibly a folder structure. Also make sure that you have another disk or destination to recover to.

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