I'm trying to use the "gpart" utility from the tutorial you linked. I ran *sudo gpart -W /dev/sdb /dev/sdb* and got the following output:

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Begin scan...
Possible partition(Windows NT/W2K FS), size(3mb), offset(16mb)
Possible partition(Windows NT/W2K FS), size(0mb), offset(19mb)
End scan.

Checking partitions...
Partition(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX or Advanced UNIX): primary
Partition(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX or Advanced UNIX): primary
Ok.

Guessed primary partition table:
Primary partition(1)
type: 007(0x07)(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX or Advanced UNIX)
size: 3mb #s(6173) s(33976-40148)
chs: (2/66/1)-(2/165/35)d (2/66/1)-(2/165/35)r

Primary partition(2)
type: 007(0x07)(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX or Advanced UNIX)
size: 0mb #s(1) s(40272-40272)
chs: (2/167/35)-(2/167/35)d (2/167/35)-(2/167/35)r

Primary partition(3)
type: 000(0x00)(unused)
size: 0mb #s(0) s(0-0)
chs: (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)d (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)r

Primary partition(4)
type: 000(0x00)(unused)
size: 0mb #s(0) s(0-0)
chs: (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)d (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)r

Edit this table (y,n) :

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Not sure what to do from there, or if this option will work. It seems like it only found a single partition of 3MB, and a few more partitions of 0MB?? It's an 8GB usb drive.

Deleted double post

Others may be able to advise further regarding the use of gpart to try to recover the partition. I have my doubts about this, but so long as you have made your backup image, you have nothing to lose I guess. Instead, I would try using foremost to attempt file recovery. The wiki suggests doing this from the backup image itself. It's only using read operations, so there should be no risk with this approach.

Can you post the output of Also, have you heard of the tool Gparted? (which is very different from gpart)

I just tried Gparted and the result was similar to gpart. It found 1 3MB NTFS partition and 1 0MB NTFS partition. So it looks like the filesystem was/is NTFS, but I don't know what's up with the weird 3MB size. I'll try foremost next and report back.

If you have everything backed up, I would suggest just deleting all of the partitions and creating a new NTFS one.

However, make sure that you're using the right disk! Double- and triple-check that sdb corresponds to the USB disk that you just inserted, and not some other disk (Does your printer have an SD-card reader? Do you have your phone plugged in? Is your mp3 player connected?). I would highly recommend completely disconnecting anything and everything that could potentially be some form of drive before proceeding. And then make sure that you're using the USB disk and not your internal hard drive.

I know that it can seem like a lot just to format a flash drive, but you'd be surprised. I've done something like this before, when I was adding a hard drive to my desktop. Fortunately, I keep pretty good backups, but it's a lot easier to seriously screw up than you think it is.

Foremost development stopped in 2008, I recommend to use Photorec (part of the Testdisk package) instead.

Good to know. Thanks for the advice.

Thanks for the help everybody, I was able to recover the files with photorec. Even though that program does recover different file types, I can see why it's called photorec. The files on my drive were mostly music files located in album directories. Although I got the files back, there are no file names and all the directories are lost, so I have a ton of .flac files all jumbled into a single directory with no artist/title info. The metadata is still there though, because when I play them all the info turns up on the player. I'll have to see if I can find a quick way to get them all re-organized.

Anyway, very glad to be able to recover the data, thanks again!

This is expected behavior, since file carving tools like Photorec ignore filesystem information (which stores filenames) and purely extract the files they can find.I am sure that there are specialized tools for that, but you could also write a script to do this. Metadata from FLAC files can easily be extracted using the metaflac tool, which comes in the flac package that most distributions should have in their repositories. For example:will show you all tags in the metadata. Single tags, like ARTIST or TITLE can be extracted with the --show-tag option, for examplewill show you the title of the track. It shouldn't be hard to use that information to write a script that generates meaningful filenames to be used to rename the files.