Linux Mint 19.3: my grandson intended to format a thumb drive and instead started to format his 2.5 Tb drive. When he realized what was happening he panicked and pulled the plug on the drive. Can this drive be restored or can all the files be recovered. He hasn't done anything to the drive since he did that.
Thank you,
John

Depends. You knew that was going to be the answer ...
Depends on what you mean by "format":
- simple repartitioning ?
- mkfs ? which partition.
- GUI disk manager format ? which partition.
- which filesystem type are we talking about.

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Testdisk is a common way to see if you can get files back.

There used to be some tools on windows and some have claimed it can work on linux for unpartition.

Systemrescue disk might have testdisk photorec but really almost any live boot has it or can add it in live.

https://www.r-studio.com/unformat-disk/

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Wow! Some very quick replies! The format was through the GUI and it seems the disk table (?) was removed because the drive, he says, is not 'recognized'? I will need to talk with him again. Thank you for all the input. I did mention to him about Testdisk as I saw that when I was looking for help so we'll see what he says. We live about 15 miles apart and even further when you consider Covid19 and how we are 'senior' age and are being very careful. At any rate, I will get back to this post after I talk with him in the next day or two. Thanks again!

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You might be lucky. If he still has the USB he installed Mint from, he can boot that in "live" mode which will give him a usable system that won't update his disk in any way. Then he can connect to his network, and we can get him to run commands. Will be much quicker and accurate.

Thank you. I didn't get a chance to talk with him today but will hopefully talk with him tomorrow. By the way, what commands are those that would speed up recovery? I wish I had known about this site a long time ago, it would have saved me a lot of grief in the past!

I rest the case for having an external backup drive. Or two.

How far into the format process, was the electronic marvel when the pulled the plug?

If the drive's existance is acknowledged by gparted under the Devices tab there are two options. Create partition table and attempt data rescue.

Whilst I have not tried then, I would, in turn, select them. Gparted might work.

Note that whichever way you go, you'll need a drive bigger than the one your trying to rescue data from. And data recovery is not a quick process.

What I meant was if we can get a person on the machine to issue commands and give us the output, it's a lot quicker than waiting for an intermediary to hot-foot over there to relay the same.
The commands will be the same, just hopefully more targetted.

I concur with the above as per my sigline.

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Thank you for your suggestions. I may not have made myself very clear. The drive that he accidentally started to format was his external backup drive that he had been storing his pictures on. He loves to do photography and he was trying to format an SD Card for his camera. The system he was using was a Mint 19.3 version of Linux. He can see the drive in the drive section but he gets a message that says: "Unable to read or write." He was trying to format it to Ext. 4 and it seemed to freeze up and when he saw that it was trying to format his 2.5Tb drive, he unplugged it. So, I got a hold of him today and had him download/install testdisk on a windows 10 system. Unfortunately, all we ended up getting was some virus with it. Go figure. Would you recommend recovery in Linux then? I found CGSecurity.org seems to have a valid program. I see it also works in Linux.

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Well, my grandson says he is going to get the system and drive over to me and then I will be able to do whatever you suggest. He isn't very computer knowledgeable, he just takes awesome pics.

Testdisk is excellent at what it does, and I only ever use it on Linux. But it may not be the tool you require - we need to better understand what the actual problem is before recovery starts.

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I'll have more info when I get the system. Thank you.

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Always format cards for camera use in camera... will prevent all kind of issues (including the above) and is recommended in the camera user manual.

Just a footnote. Carry on!


/edit: if he loves the photo files as well, do keep at the very least two backups...