cloned drive to external hard drive.

[amr-elfiky]

i was trying to restore my formatted D partition using testdisk .i was following the first answer in this question.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/296109/need-to-recover-data-from-a-data-hard-disk-that-i-used-testdisk-on-in-my-attempt

one of the steps i was supposed to clone my D drive to an external hard cloned itto and external hard overnight .when it finished i noticed that the 1 TB external hard was all wiped out and replaced by my formatted D drive .
i tried to restore the partition of the external hard using testdisk ,gparted and gpart but they said they couldn't find it .
can anyone help me ,please ?

[leunam12]

Didn't you get a warning telling you that you were going to lose all your data in your 1TB? What program did you use to clone? Clonezilla requires three confirmations before it starts writing to disk

[sudodus]

I'm afraid that you had tough luck. Cloning a drive means that you overwrite it (sometimes every single block, sometimes 'only' blocks that belong to files (skipping free blocks).

If the target drive is bigger than the source drive, the part of the target drive 'behind' what is overwritten might be possible to restore. So if the source drive contains 120 GB and the target drive contains 500 GB, the space 'behind' is from 120 GB to 500 GB (size 380 GB), and the file data stored there is possible to recover with for example PhotoRec. If you are really lucky, there may be gaps of blocks (not overwritten), that contain valuable data also among the overwritten data.

-o-

An alternative that would keep the existing data on the external drive is to make a compressed image file. That compressed image file can be expanded into another (target) drive, which will contain the directories and files of the original source drive. Clonezilla is a tool that can do that.

[amr-elfiky]

leunam12, i didn't . i just used this command,sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY .

[amr-elfiky]

sudodus, the source drive was 260 GB and the target was 1TB .i think there is still hope .i just need to get the lost partitions on the external hard back .i mean , its whole capacity now is 260 GB .there is nothing else .it's like it shrank .

[sudodus]

dd is nick-named 'disk destroyer' It does what you tell it to do without questions, and does not give you a second chance. You are neither the first nor the last victim.

-o-

But all the unallocated space behind those 260 GB is untouched by dd. It stopped writing when it had cloned the source drive, and PhotoRec can recover data without a file system (so also behind the current file system).

PhotoRec comes from http://www.cgsecurity.org/ that also provides TestDisk. Please read what you can find at that web site (and maybe other helpful texts that you find via the internet), and then start using PhotoRec.

It might be a good idea to get a fresh target drive (another and empty external drive), where you can copy the files that are recovered.

[amr-elfiky]

disk destroyer? why do these things happen to me ?! but PhotoRec loses all the files names and restores unnecessary files .can i use other date recovery software ? even these for windows ?

[sudodus]

You are right about PhotoRec. Only if the file name is stored inside the file, it can be restored by PhotoRec. But you can make separate searches for different file types and make a coarse separation that way.

I don't know any better tool. I hope someone will chip in and suggest some Windows tool or some other linux tool.

You have already used TestDisk. Maybe if you do a deep search (which will take a lot of time), it might find some structure of the previous file system (NTFS?) after the overwritten part. But I don't know.

[amr-elfiky]

right now i'm "checking" the drive through gparted .the "check" option wasn't available .i guess i needed to unmount the drive .then i'll try data recovery with gparted and testdisk one more time before i lose all hope . i heard there's a great windows tool for data recovery called "Recuva ". i think it restores the files names and maybe the directory .
https://www.piriform.com/recuva

[sudodus]

Good luck

And other people, who read this: Please chip in and suggest some Windows tool or some other linux tool.