Overwrote my external Hdd with recovery disk. Help with recovery.

[smblee14]

I recently overwrote my external disk with all my photos on it with the windows recovery disk. It turned my drive into 30gb or so. I panicked and I went to disk manager or something like that and unallocated the 30gb portion of the drive hoping it would bring it back. Now I have a 30 Gb unallocated space and like 1 Tb(size of my drive) unallocated space. I can't access it in any way and I don't want to touch anything anymore.

What should I do? I saw people suggesting reformat to NTFS but I'm afraid that it will ruin my drive to a state where my data are unrecoverable. Are there softwares I can try?

Please help! Thank you.

 

[popatim]

Absolutely do not allow anything to format, 'write to', or make changes to your drive. At this point you only want "read access" to the drive and you stand a good chance at having already lost the first 30GB of data on the drive, whatever was there.

What I suggest, since you don't have a backup of your data (which is a second copy of it on another device) is to purchase another external drive and use this new drive to recover your files too. Recuva can search for and recover files but we may be able to recover the partition and save quite a bit of time.

First, let us know what size drives you have in your system. Ideally we should image the 1TB External before doing anything and to do that we will need 1tb of space on another drive. The image will be a large file that we can work from, it does not need to be on its own drive. Any drive with 1tb+ of free space would be ideal.

 

[smblee14]

Absolutely do not allow anything to format, 'write to', or make changes to your drive. At this point you only want "read access" to the drive and you stand a good chance at having already lost the first 30GB of data on the drive, whatever was there.

What I suggest, since you don't have a backup of your data (which is a second copy of it on another device) is to purchase another external drive and use this new drive to recover your files too. Recuva can search for and recover files but we may be able to recover the partition and save quite a bit of time.

First, let us know what size drives you have in your system. Ideally we should image the 1TB External before doing anything and to do that we will need 1tb of space on another drive. The image will be a large file that we can work from, it does not need to be on its own drive. Any drive with 1tb+ of free space would be ideal.

I have a 3.5tb external hardrive. So I do have a good news on this. I was able to recover 400gb of files which was about all what I had. But the problem is the recovered files are in random order and random file names, in enumerating folder numbers. So it's gonna be a PAIN in the ass to go through 200k + files. I used TestDisk software to do so. Recuva wasnt working for me (or at least i couldnt figure it out). I am now wondering if folder structure recovery is possible along with the files themselves, or is this too much to dream

 

[popatim]

Yes thats normal since the old File Allocation tables were erased with the partition creation.
I give you credit for successfully using Testdisk on your first try! LoL.

Now that your images are somewhat safe, I would attempt to recover that original partition which would mean most of your files would be recovered and in thier respective Folders.

Again, I would create an image before attempting a partition recovery.
Use TestDisk to create an Image of the 1TB external (this will take many hours). It is under the 'Advanced' menu.

Then, disconnecting the 3.5tb, try to recover the original partition of the 1tb using TestDisk. If it fails you can always restore the image to the 1tb and be back where you started.

 

[popatim]

Btw- I recomment at least a minimum or two devices for backups in addition to your main storage.
If your main has an issue, one of the backups now becomes the main and you still have a backup drive! Many also recommend that backup2 (or 3) be kept offsite. (Mine is in my sisters basement)

With only 1 drive for a backup, if your main goes down then your backup becomes the main starage and the first job is getting another backup asap. (This could be accomplished by fixing the main)