Hi,

Earlier this afternoon i made a big hugh mistake. Accidentally i installed Elementayr OS Loki (Beta) on my 500 GiB Toshiba external HDD drive.

I followed this thread to create a bootable USB Stick.

Unfortunately, i had my external 500 GiB drive also plugged in. While my USB stick was mounted as /dev/sdd, the eternal drive was mounted as /dev/sdc. And if you look at the commands given in that link you will see that the command for creating the bootable USB stick was meant for a stick mounted as /dev/sdc..... Not paying attention (don't ask why, my mind was a bit far away at that moment when i did it thinking of something else...) ended up with installing Elementary OS on my external drive wipping my whole disc cleaning out every file what's on that disc.

I have very important files stored on that disc for my work since i travel a lot between my works office and a production site outside The Netherlands for a client. So i had all my personal and project files on that 500 GiB external USB drive.


I only have 1 question:
HOW DO I RESTORE MY 500 GiB EXTERNAL DRIVE RECOVERING MY DATA ON THAT FILE???

Any help will be very much appreciated! Please keep in mind i'm not that technical so a step-by-step guide would come in very handy!

Thanks again guys!!

1 answer - you can't.

That's why backups were invented.

By over-writing the image, you destroyed at least 1.6 Gig at the front of the disk. Try testdidk to see what of the remainder you might be abte to recover.

Send it to a data recovery service. You can find some in the net. I've never had to use one myself, and there's no practical method for thoroughly testing data retrieval companies. Even with the best of these services, there's no guarantee you'll get your files back.

I see you've split this off from your original thread, which was started about an unrelated topic. Good.

The tool of choice is testdisk, which should be able to discover the remains of the original filesystem and allow you to copy files from it. You can do that from the original drive as long as you are very careful not to let testdisk write anything to that drive, but it is much safer to make an image of that drive first and work only from the copy. If you have a filesystem with at least 500GB of free space, you can do that withReplace the "{X}" with the appropriate letter for the source drive.

I'll ask again, do you know what filesystem was originally on that drive? That's going to make a big difference in the liklihood of successful recovery. I'm really hoping it was not FAT32 or VFAT, since both copies of the FAT will have been overwritten, which will leave you with little choice other than a very frustrating session with photorec trying to see what bits, pieces, and unfragmented files you make sense of. Professional data recovery would be a better bet there.

This, especially since you state that you are not very technical, and from reviewing the two threads I've seen thus far, you have just made a very bad mistake at overwriting a disk with different data.

Also bear in mind a couple of things:

(1) syg00 is likely correct in that you have lost the data and will not be able to recover it
(2) recovery services are expensive and there are no guarantees
(3) whatever a recovery service does recover may not be a full file, but a bunch of fragments.