Made a huge mistake, cleaned a disk using disk part, lost data

Posted by DeejayCa@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 25 comments

Hi all. Anyone have a link to the shitty sysadmin subreddit? I f'ed up pretty hard here. I accidentally cleaned a partition of a secondary drive that had data on it that I really need. The only thing I've done after the clean was attempt to perform a quick format for NTFS and it has a drive letter assigned to it. I'm trying testdisk 7.3 but I don't think its locating any partition information because of the quick format. Do you have any recommendations on which software I can try to recover this data? Any free or paid tools? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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25 Comments

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JJaska@reddit

If you \_REALLY\_ need the data, unplug the drive NOW and contact a data recovery service like OnTrack (used to be called Norman Ibas). This will cost a pretty penny, but if you cannot afford losing the data is a cheap comparison. When working with SSDs you risk the data trim functions to kick in and permanently wipe your data from the memory. If you don't REALLY need to recover the data, then you are free to try data recovery softwares. Just get a low level image from the drive (usually cannot be done from a deleted partition without special tooling when talking about SSD:s).

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VA_Network_Nerd@reddit

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Ubermidget2@reddit

\> It's an SSD https://preview.redd.it/5k88ezl4kzrg1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=c0b73192e9e800512ac454740dd3c3318a2f4b51 Unfortunately, due to the way TRIM processes, not writing to it doesn't help a whole lot. As another has said - Backups?

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Ssakaa@reddit

> quick format for NTFS Yeah... that'd do it...

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Away-Ad-3407@reddit

this. can’t recall any time i was successful in ssd recovery. spinning disks, for sure. especially with DMDE.

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nicat23@reddit

Easus partition or data recovery pro, would recommend it to anyone.

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DeejayCa@reddit (OP)

Are these the ones you're referring to? https://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizardpro/ What vendor sells "data recovery pro" seems a generic term and I can't find the one you're referring to.

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asdlkf@reddit

First word of the post you are replying to is easus

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shimoheihei2@reddit

The one who messed up was whoever had important data on that disk with no backup. Making a mistake like the one you described is normal.

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DeejayCa@reddit (OP)

This I know. I'm going to have to approach the owner with the news and see what can be done, the recovery process isn't looking good - or I'm just not experienced enough to be able to recover this data. For all I know, the drive is failing as that was the reason why I had it in hand to begin with, to start with a fresh OS SSD and move the drive as a data disk.

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Professional-Heat690@reddit

Sorry, your ssd failed while attempting to protect your data, do you have a backup copy?

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looncraz@reddit

Make a RAW image of the entire SSD. Your data is there unless you're unlucky and the drive reset its encoding seed or did a block discard. Then it will just be gone forever. Those can happen at any time, so.you want to make an image of the SSD ***ASAP***.

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DeejayCa@reddit (OP)

I'm going to do this as soon as the deep scan is finished with TestDisk. I hope the software I found works for it, HDDRawCopy2.5Portable

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Away-Ad-3407@reddit

hddrawcopy is a boss (but slow) but do let us know if you recover anything. i would be surprised. still hopeful for you.

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nicat23@reddit

Cross posted for you op

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DeejayCa@reddit (OP)

lol thank you

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nicat23@reddit

Check your dms!

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DeejayCa@reddit (OP)

I don't see anything

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brispower@reddit

Restore from backup, roll back changes as per your change control?

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DeejayCa@reddit (OP)

Well yes, that's the thing - I was about to set up a backup strategy based on this new change of moving data from OS disk to dedicated data drive, but here we are.

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brispower@reddit

Indeed

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jews4beer@reddit

I've successfully used TestDisk to recover NTFS partitions before. Did you allow it to try a deeper search? As a side note, best to take a raw image of the drive first (with dd or the like) before attempting recovery. That way if you screw it up further you still have your starting point in tact.

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DeejayCa@reddit (OP)

Thanks for responding. Will a deep search look past the fact that the disk was quick formatted within windows? The regular scan didn't show any partition data. At this point I don't care about the disk structure, it's just the files on the drive.

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jews4beer@reddit

If you only care about the files, you can try PhotoRec instead. It uses signature based file carving so it doesn't rely on the partition structure. The downside is you lose stuff like filenames on anything it finds. The deep search would defiinitely have a better chance at finding the old partition, but nothing is guaranteed. It also takes several hours depending on the size of the disk.

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DeejayCa@reddit (OP)

Ok I'm trying the deep search now. Thanks.