2

I was trying to restore my formatted D partition using testdisk by following the first answer in this Q&A

In one of the steps I was supposed to clone my D drive to an external HDD and did so overnight. When it finished I noticed that the 1 TB external hard was all wiped out and replaced by my formatted D drive .

I tried to restore the partition of the external hard using testdisk, gparted and gpart but they said they couldn't find anything.

How should I proceed?

Community
  • 1
amr elfiky
  • 33

1 Answers1

1

If you used dd if=/dev/XdY of=/dev/AdB and our internal HDD was larger then the amount of data stored on your external drive, you've lost everything on the external hard drive. (Depending on the size of the internal HDD and the amount of data that the external HDD contained, your chances of recovery vary from 0% to an unknown %…)

As you're talking about a D-drive, I suppose you were following very advanced Linux instructions to the letter and that is why the original post mentions:

It is critical at this point to get the dd command correctly. If you gave the wrong entry to of= you may damage all data that had existed there.

To clone a drive to an image file the correct form of the command would have been:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/ubuntu/D-Drive.img

As a side note, dd is also know as disk destroyer in the Linux community as it can do extremely powerful things, but also do extremely disastrous things if used wrongly.

Fabby
  • 34,259
  • :-) Thanks... I asked you to delete yours as I'm not a moderator on this site, just a reviewer and editor so I cannot delete other people's comments. ;-) Let's leave it this way: clean enough! – Fabby May 25 '15 at 07:11