External HDD formatted, lost an excesive amount of space

HungGarTiger · 2012-07-09 15:08:51

When writing an Arch .iso to a USB in Debian I accidently wrote it to my external HDD. Completely my fault, I didn't check the link before writing to "dev/sdb" (which is where my USB is always linked, unless I have my external HDD mounted) and wrote to my external HDD.

Since I reformatted, the drive has gone from 1TB to 1GB in size. I was wondering how to recover my size and if possible data. I have googled and looked at the wiki but couldn't find anything other than Windoze NTFS / FAT32 guides.

So if I can recover data and even 1/2 my space I will be happy.

Any advice will be appreciated,

Thank you

*edited for awful spelling*

Last edited by HungGarTiger (2012-07-09 15:18:46)

Inxsible · 2012-07-09 15:12:56

are you sure you aren't looking at the wrong drive again?

ewaller · 2012-07-09 15:19:26

HungGarTiger wrote:

...Since I reformatted, the drive has gone from 1TB to 1GB in size...

Do you recall, specifically, how you formatted it?,

HungGarTiger · 2012-07-09 15:21:06

Inxsible wrote:

are you sure you aren't looking at the wrong drive again?

No I am only connecting one at a time, so I am sure I am looking in the right place.

I have nothing that is sized 1.1GB anyway, USB's and such are mounting properly under Thunar. It is only this drive that is causing me ball-ache

HungGarTiger · 2012-07-09 15:24:14

ewaller wrote:

HungGarTiger wrote:
...Since I reformatted, the drive has gone from 1TB to 1GB in size...
Do you recall, specifically, how you formatted it?,

I used Debians (gnomes) "right click format" NTFS system, which I have never had problems with. It seems that the issue is only after having written the .iso to the drive

bjornoslav · 2012-07-09 15:24:46

Do this:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1024k count=1

Where X is the letter of the USB flash drive/hard drive that you want its partition tables totally erased.
Be sure to type the correct letter, otherwise you might erase your system hard drive and lose data!
Afterwards, be sure to reboot the PC and then check out if Gparted shows the capacity correctly.

Pres · 2012-07-09 19:06:00

If you create a new partition table, that should solve your first issue (in gparted this is under Device->Create Partition Table).

First though before messing around with the hard drive too much, you should attempt to recover what data you need off of it (If any. Hopefully you have backups). The Arch ISO should only have overwritten the first 300MB or so of the drive, so you should be able to recover most of it with a tool like photorec or foremost. If you can, it would be better to make a dd backup of the entire drive first to work with (in case you mess anything up even more), though with 1TB of space that might be too much.

shulamy · 2012-07-09 19:27:36

what about testdisk ?

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

ezik

cfr · 2012-07-09 22:29:30

I realise that it is too late for this now, but if you screw something up like this and might want to recover data, you should not touch the hard drive further before recovery. For example, don't reformat it... I don't mean there's no hope. Just the less you do to it, the better the chances of recovering what you need from it. As Pres says, copying the drive and working on the copy is safest.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-07-09 15:08:51

External HDD formatted, lost an excesive amount of space

#2 2012-07-09 15:12:56

Re: External HDD formatted, lost an excesive amount of space

#3 2012-07-09 15:19:26

Re: External HDD formatted, lost an excesive amount of space

#4 2012-07-09 15:21:06

Re: External HDD formatted, lost an excesive amount of space

#5 2012-07-09 15:24:14

Re: External HDD formatted, lost an excesive amount of space

#6 2012-07-09 15:24:46

Re: External HDD formatted, lost an excesive amount of space

#7 2012-07-09 19:06:00

Re: External HDD formatted, lost an excesive amount of space

#8 2012-07-09 19:27:36

Re: External HDD formatted, lost an excesive amount of space

#9 2012-07-09 22:29:30

Re: External HDD formatted, lost an excesive amount of space

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