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In a moment of stupidity I let a script run dd on one of my (non backed up :() HDD's, 3TB in size. It had a single ext4 filesystem on it, which now won't mount.

Things I've done so far (without success) from reading other people's misery:

  1. made a backup of the drive to an image with dd.
  2. ran testdisk on the drive, this produced around 20 lines of the following when running Analyse (both quick and deep): ext4 0 0 1 364801 80 63 5860533168 [files]. It won't let me fix it because it says writes aren't allowed when None is picked, any other combination of choices seems to be fruitless too (e.g. tried choosing Intel in the partition type, still a no go). By the way, files is the name of my old partition.

  3. tried to mount the drive with a backup superblock as shown here:

    $ sudo mke2fs -n /dev/sdc
mke2fs 1.42.8 (20-Jun-2013)
/dev/sdc is entire device, not just one partition!
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
183148544 inodes, 732566646 blocks
36628332 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=4294967296
22357 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
    32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
    4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968, 
    102400000, 214990848, 512000000, 550731776, 644972544

    this kept saying wrong filesystem type when running mount.

  4. created a GPT partition table with gparted and tried to run fsck with a backup superblock, which had a lot of prompts and really weird numbers that didn't make any sense.

So I'm close to giving up unfortunately, because using photorec to try to extract the files without the directory structure is just going to be too time consuming.

Is there anything else worth trying that I haven't tried/did wrong?

daniel.jackson
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    Short of trying to recreate the first 200MB from an identically formatted drive and then run testdisk, I can't really think to anything... sorry. – Rmano Mar 21 '14 at 15:17
  • related if not a duplicate: http://askubuntu.com/questions/94421/is-there-a-way-to-recover-files-from-a-storage-device-partially-overwritten-with - I believe if testdisk can't recover your partitions you may have no other choice than with photorec but let's see if someone has a better idea. – Takkat Mar 21 '14 at 17:10

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