HELP. I just ruined my hard drive

scamper

Dedicated elf
Joined
Jan 5, 2014
Messages
1,225
Location
collie
Well this is a first for me, and maybe the biggest mistake of my life, but I think I just destroyed years of backups on my hard drive.
I was installing the new FPP on my raspberry Pi 3 using the win32 disk imager and after the second attempt it all went fine.
Now i went to look for some old saved documentation from last years xmas display, my hard drive, which has always been D:, is now listed as Boot I: and seems to have fpp data on it. and even though it is a 1tb hard drive, it says it is 48mb.
Is there any smart people out there that know a work around to get my data back? Please.......
 

darylc

404 darylc not found
Joined
Dec 8, 2012
Messages
1,146
Best best case you have lost the first 48mb of the 1tb drive which probably includes all the indexes. In theory it should be possible to recover some of your files. Either google up data recovery software (there are some free options usually) or contact a computer expert
 

Derf

am now a 5v hypocrite
Joined
Dec 1, 2016
Messages
251
Location
Narellan Vale, NSW
Try open your Disk Management

Press Start -> Type in "Computer Management" -> In the list there should be an item called "Disk Management"

In there you will see all connected storage media C Drive, Etc,
Find your external 1TB drive and you should see it has been divided up. Something like this:
249ed139e2187b8be40b9c9c580c3f57.PNG

Select your 1tb drive and then check up the top you will see it highlighted grey. in that list you will see a % Free if it is 100-98% free you may have to perform Deep data recovery with software that checks sectors on the drive marked as "Formatted / Free" but still contains data which can be remarked as "In Use".

If it has a substantial amount of data on it you may be as lucky as marking the partition as active and assigning it a drive letter to get it working again.
 

scamper

Dedicated elf
Joined
Jan 5, 2014
Messages
1,225
Location
collie
Try open your Disk Management

Press Start -> Type in "Computer Management" -> In the list there should be an item called "Disk Management"

In there you will see all connected storage media C Drive, Etc,
Find your external 1TB drive and you should see it has been divided up. Something like this:
249ed139e2187b8be40b9c9c580c3f57.PNG

Select your 1tb drive and then check up the top you will see it highlighted grey. in that list you will see a % Free if it is 100-98% free you may have to perform Deep data recovery with software that checks sectors on the drive marked as "Formatted / Free" but still contains data which can be remarked as "In Use".

If it has a substantial amount of data on it you may be as lucky as marking the partition as active and assigning it a drive letter to get it working again.
Yep, saw it all there, but when you click all the buttons are greyed out so you cannot change anything. i will try and get partition magic later and see if I can redo the partitions as Richard helped earlier and we found that all the data is there, just the partition has changed.
 

MrX

New elf
Joined
Sep 1, 2018
Messages
41
I feel for you, it's a crappy feeling when you do something like this.

I am not good at data recovery, it is not my specialty, but I understand the concepts and have had some success with it over the years. The number one thing you want to do is absolutely minimise any use of the affected drive unless you are performing actual recovery operations. I wouldn't be manually trying to recreate partitions or doing anything except running recovery tool over it. Any writing the hard disk is subject to lessens the chance of getting data back. I take it is a removal USB drive? If it is a boot drive then I would be booting to a different drive before doing any recovery effort.
 

scamper

Dedicated elf
Joined
Jan 5, 2014
Messages
1,225
Location
collie
So @scamper did you recover your data??
No, not yet. I have been a little busy and haven't had the time to look into it yet. If anyone knows any free recovery tools, I am more than happy to accept your help.
And no, it is a plug in back up drive, so it is not being used. Just sitting there tormenting me :(
 

BradsXmasLights

WiFi Interactive
Joined
Dec 23, 2010
Messages
601
Location
Brisbane, Australia
I've done that EXACT same thing before - hit the wrong drive letter when building a FPP SD card

I got most of my files back - although not their original filenames. This wasn't the end of the world as the nuked drive was just timelapse video footage, so I could figure out the file order based on modified dates.

I think I used http://www.pcinspector.de/ to scan the disk looking for the files.

Cold comfort now; but the warning to all: BACKUP! (and don't leave backups attached to the same system!)
 
Top