Help, destroyed my external HDD using dd :(
 

Hello All

I destroyed the first few blocks of my external HDD:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512

Few seconds and I pressed ctrl+c to terminate. I realized I am running on my external HDD instead of the laptop's MBR :(

I badly need to restore data from this external HDD, and of course I am unable to mount it..

The external HDD itself has no backups. It's Western Digital, one partition, 320 Gigs, had around 15 Gigs free.

Please help, some important data on this external HDD (4 Gigs) are the only copy I have!

Your help is really appreciated.. Thanks in advance.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/...on-Rescue.html
http://smallsrv.com/recovery/

That command erased the MBR, including the partition table. Depending on what you mean by "a few seconds" it **might** have erased some data. The chances are that most of your data is still there.

First: Do not do anything that would cause a write to the drive. If the data is REALLY important, then consider cloning it before trying anything else.

Standard recovery tools include testdisk and photorec (both from the same author).

Thank you all, I partially recovered my data from emails and copies with friends. I figured out that the external HDD was erased twice using (dd) and it remained as unallocated space for a couple of days, so I reformatted in ext3 and copied my data that was scattered among friends and emails.

Thanks again :)

And you bought another external drive to use for backups---right??

Regardless, glad you recovered...