Question Accidentally wiped an ext4 partition and can't recover it ?

[vanillaguerilla970]

Accidentally wiped a 4tb hdd in a sabrent 4 bay sata-usb dock with 1 4tb ext4 partition from open media vault 6 and realized it almost immediately. Not a security wipe or anything just a quick wipe. I wanted to wait for my kid to get home because he's alot smarter about this stuff than i am..

long story short I told him that i messed up and he came home later, i was gone then, says he ran testdisk on the drives and couldnt find the partition... the disk was like 3/4 full with music and movies and e-books... problem is i didnt label the drives and the kid didn't label the drives and there are 3 identical disks in this sabrent 4 bay hub that have been removed...

i cant figure out which one is the one with the data and all attempts to run testdisk on all 3 disks and doing extensive searches i cannot find this ext4 partition... I know im an idiot.... i already slapped my kid for taking the disks out of the bay without labeling them.

i know we havent written to a new partition yet so the data is still there but ive tried photorec on all 3 disks also and gotten nothing so far... any suggestions? I was just about to backup this collection of stuff that ive been working on collecting for about 15 yr and keep in mind i only know enough to get in the hole so im gonna need really detailed information.

And in my panic i might be leaving a few details out.. ive done this type of thing with ntfs partitions before and recovered them no problem so i thought it wasnt a big deal... now im freaking out because i know about ext4 and when i read about it it's like listening to charlie browns teacher...

im clueless. any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

I hope something good happens to you today

 

[Ralston18]

Do I understand correctly that each disk can be accessed to run "testdisk" etc.

One possibility is to use Powershell and the Get-Partition cmdlet.

FYI:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/storage/get-partition?view=windowsserver2022-ps

= = = =

Results (in bold font) from my PC. Your results will, of course, be different.

Windows PowerShell
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PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-Partition


DiskPath: \\?\scsi#disk&ven_ata&prod_samsung_ssd_870#6&3af99ce4&4&000000#{53f56307-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b}

PartitionNumber DriveLetter Offset Size Type
--------------- ----------- ------ ---- ----
1 17408 15.98 MB Reserved
2 T 16777216 931.5 GB Basic


DiskPath: \\?\scsi#disk&ven_nvme&prod_kbg30zms256g_nvm#4&381e1525&0&020000#{53f56307-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b}

PartitionNumber DriveLetter Offset Size Type
--------------- ----------- ------ ---- ----
1 1048576 650 MB System
2 682622976 128 MB Reserved
3 C 816840704 224 GB Basic
4 241339203584 990 MB Recovery
5 242377293824 11.66 GB Recovery
6 254897291264 1.07 GB Recovery


DiskPath: \\?\scsi#disk&ven_samsung&prod_ssd#4&381e1525&0&000000#{53f56307-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b}

PartitionNumber DriveLetter Offset Size Type
--------------- ----------- ------ ---- ----
1 1048576 128 MB Reserved
2 D 135266304 465.63 GB Basic


PS C:\WINDOWS\system32>

That said do not immediately do anything.

Not wishing to cause further problems or complications.

There may be other ideas and suggestions regarding sabrent etc..

And if the Get-Partition cmdlet is even a viable option to use per the described circumstances.

 

[Moonstick2]

So you didn't label your drives yourself, you haven't performed a backup in 15 years, and you selected wipe and confirmed it on the disk with your data on...your kid taking the drives out not realising you hadn't labelled them is neither here nor there, so hardly anything to blame him for.

OMV6 quick wipe just deletes the partition table as I understand it, so it ought to be recoverable. If testdisk can't find it that's a worry, so try it again, following this link and the section "Test Disk Partition Recovery", posting the results for all the disks here as screenshots. Note the "Deeper Search" option. Do you know what partition table type it was?

It's also very unclear why you can't tell which of the three disks is the one with its partition table wiped, because the other two should have partition tables and show up as partitioned. Or did you wipe them all?