How to recover a HDD with first 4MB deleted?

Question

I have a 500GB Western Digital MyBook II which was partioned with one NTFS (pretty sure, but may also have been FAT32) partition spanning the whole disk (partitioning and formatting done with WinXP 32bit). Recently, I fat-fingered

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=4M count=1

which overwrote the first four megs of the disk with zeros.

Using Ubuntu, should I rather try to recover ...

• according to the advice given for accidentally deleted partitions
• according to the advice given for corrupted or deleted partition tables

or is there a sure fire way for my particular case?

Note: I borrowed an empty 2TB drive from a friend, so I do have enough space for experimentation.

Answer 1

TestDisk did a wonderful job recovering 12.5k files with only 50 files lost. I used these instructions.

Then I donated to TestDisk, and so should you if it helped you ;-)