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Yes, the old story: Trying to create an image of a partition to save in a different location... the accident is/was cloning to an external drive instead of the intended location and now the external drive has lost its structure and data.

I was trying to make an image of a partition and save it to an external hard drive. I (somewhat) followed the directions on this post: Cloning with DD command while also using these and other commands such as dd if=/dev/sda1 of=~/disk2.img but my attempt was a big fail not to mention a lost of my hard drive.

After I typed the command, dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/(forgot the drive here) repeatedly and with different parameters, I realized the destination was wrong. Even worst, in the process of copying I thought I had stopped it by pressing Control + C then I unplugged the drive. I was wrong.

Now my external drive is screwed up. It is not being recognized by Linux or other OSs. Linux gives me an error when plugging the h.d. in. See image below.

So, can the cloning be undone or do I have to opt for data recovery? Is my hard drive ruined?

Although this error was not my intention, an answer on this post makes me think this is what happened to my drive.

enter image description here

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LittleTIME
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Not really.

Cloning writes raw blockdata to your drive, making it extremely hard to recover information if you choose a bad path.

That said, you might be able to send it off to a professional data recovery team, but that's expensive and there's no guarantee that it'll work.

To recover your drive to a usable state, simply open up GParted or your Disk utility and create a new partition on your drive.

Recovering data itself might be possible in very rare conditions, if by some miracle you stopped the clone before it reached into a second partition. If this is the case, you'd just have to rebuild the partition tables in their exact position. Unfortunately, this is harder than it looks and is usually impossible.

Finally, there have been some reports of photorec working, but that isn't the norm. YMMV.

dd is very often and aptly referred to as Disk Destroyer. Take extra care when using that command.

Kaz Wolfe
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  • Oh no! Obviously the damage is done. I've been looking at data recovery software but I'm having the hardest time figuring out what file format the drive is best suited for. Why? So far the Recovering Software is discovering NTFS and FAT boot records. (It's strange since I only had one partition in the drive) I have images of different OS and other files in there but I'm not sure what THE MAIN file format would be. Does that make any sense? BTW, I didn't wait for the whole dd cloning process. I "stopped' it a few seconds after it had started so Im counting on data not being fully destroyed. – LittleTIME Sep 06 '15 at 19:54
  • @LittleTIME The multiple filesystems might be showing up because the partition table on the drive got corrupt/borked with the clone. The main file format would be whatever you're most concerned about saving. There's no guarantee that you'd be able to recover much, though. – Kaz Wolfe Sep 06 '15 at 19:54
  • I agree. I'm giving up the idea my "life savings" are done and gone. Well, now I either embark on recovering data from my drive or just let my frustration settle. My questions for data recovery are hunting me. – LittleTIME Sep 08 '15 at 08:54