0
So I'm an idiot
And last night, half-asleep, in an attempt to mount a .img to my exFAT-formatted external drive so I could boot Ubuntu from it, I ran
dd if=foo.img of=/dev/disk1
like the Ubuntu guide here says to, except I forgot the bs=1m argument. I realized I had messed it up, and Ctrl+C'd the running program, but not before it had written a couple mb of data to the disk. It now refuses to mount on both OS X and Windows.
My question: is there any way to recover an external drive that has been corrupted in such a fashion?
glittershark
Posted 2013-04-07T05:15:01.843
Reputation: 101
You may want to try using GParted to "reformat" the drive (as exFAT,) then reboot to Windows and use a file recovery tool on the drive. (I think Recuva might be good for that - not sure if it supports exFAT, though...) Also, don't feel too bad. I accidentally reformatted my WHOLE internal hard drive, in a manner MUCH worse than what you did. Formatting the wrong drive happens to the best of us (namely ME ;P) so don't beat yourself up over it. :) – JamesTheAwesomeDude – 2013-04-07T05:19:14.740
@JamesTheAwesomeDude: Why of all things would you recommend something even more destructive before running data recovery? Recuva and similar apps aren't magic bullets that guarantee recovery. – Karan – 2013-04-07T14:14:36.350
1@glittershark: Try TestDisk, it might help. – Karan – 2013-04-07T14:15:48.387
@Karan The supposedly "destructive" process of reformatting the drive only dorks with a wee bit of data in the very front of the disk (provided he's using GParted like I told him to,) - data that is A) Most likely already not important data - it was already being used to mark the drive as exFAT beforehand and B) Already completely lost - he already overwrote a few megs of data. On top of that, recuva can only scan drives that have a letter. For Windows to assign them a lettter, they have to be mounted, and therefore not corrupted. – JamesTheAwesomeDude – 2013-04-08T04:46:05.720
glittershark, are there any important files on your drive that you need to recover, or do you just need to get it working? – JamesTheAwesomeDude – 2013-04-08T04:48:23.713
@JamesTheAwesomeDude: So GParted only allows quick formatting and not a full format of the entire disk? If so that might work out fine I guess, although personally I'd try TestDisk first. – Karan – 2013-04-08T11:54:46.703