Arch Linux

dustyfoxxo

Member

Registered: 2024-12-02

Posts: 2

Accedentaly imaged main drive with installation media [Solved]

I had a problem with my desktop's drive so i backed up all my important files to my laptop and went to go make a installation usb to install arch onto a different drive, but i accidentally typed the disk for the drive in my laptop instead of the usb stick. I realized my mistake and stopped the command pretty quickly, so hopefully it did not do too much damage. My laptop is running btrfs and a kernel stub boot, i lost my hyprland config and a whole bunch of game progress, the rest i have got backed up to another usb drive thankfully, but in terms of my hyprland config and my game progress am i screwed or is there some way to recover this data? i do not have a drive big enough to hold a raw disk image of my whole drive so if i can backup specific folders or just the @home subvolume that would be great.

Last edited by dustyfoxxo (2025-09-02 21:09:08)

jonno2002

Member

Registered: 2016-11-21

Posts: 851

Re: Accedentaly imaged main drive with installation media [Solved]

read this if you havent already, if you stopped the imaging quickly youve probably just lost the partition table and whatever is at the start of the disk, testdisk SHOULD be able to fix the partition table and/or browse and extract files, note that ive never used btrfs, only dealt with ext4 and ntfs when recovering data.

dustyfoxxo

Member

Registered: 2024-12-02

Posts: 2

Re: Accedentaly imaged main drive with installation media [Solved]

read this if you havent already, if you stopped the imaging quickly youve probably just lost the partition table and whatever is at the start of the disk, testdisk SHOULD be able to fix the partition table and/or browse and extract files, note that ive never used btrfs, only dealt with ext4 and ntfs when recovering data.

Thank you soooo much! After a bit of figuring out how to use testdisk and how to mount a disk image i got everything recovered. Thank you!

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,187

Re: Accedentaly imaged main drive with installation media [Solved]

\o/
Please always remember to mark resolved threads by editing your initial posts subject - so others will know that there's no task left, but maybe a solution to find.
Thanks.

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