I've got a 1TB Seagate external drive (model 9sd2a6-500 if it matters) which had a single partition on it (the partitioning hadn't been changed from purchase). I'd used truecrypt (
www.truecrypt.org) to encrypt the entire disk. a few days ago I plugged it into a Windows box, which decided that it should be repartitioned, and deleted the partition. I unplugged it before any more damage was done (so no more formatting had been started), but the disk now shows no partitions at all. I tried testdisk (
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) on it, but it said it couldn't find any partitions (though that could have been because the disk was encrypted). I tried setting up a virtual disk with
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=disk.img bs=1024 count=1M
$ losetup /dev/loop4 disk.img
$ fdisk /dev/loop4
<create new partition, type 7 (HPFS/NTFS), that spans the entire file>
$ kpartx -a `pwd`/disk.img
$ truecrypt -c /dev/mapper/loop4p1
<create new truecrypt volume over entire file>
$
<mount file using truecrypt, then copy some files onto it, then umount it>
$ kpartx -d `pwd`/disk.img
$ fdisk /dev/loop4
<delete partition>
$ fdisk /dev/loop4
<create the same partition over the entire disk>
$ <try to mount truecrypt volume>
truecrypt: wrong password or not a truecrypt device
I bought a new 1TB Seagate drive (of a different type), mounted it, copied some stuff to it, umounted it, deleted the partition, recreated the partition, and tried to mount it again. It failed, with the message that there was no filesystem on it.
Any other suggestions? Have I lost my data?
Thanks