Help! Recover data hard drive?

[louarnold]

What a bad day...
In attempting to recover a USB flash drive, I accidentally wrote 4GB of zeros to a data hard drive instead of the flash drive. That drive was the back-up drive (of course!!!). Any chance of resurrecting that hard drive to keep the data?

I had tried to force a file check (/forcefsck) on reboot, but its not clear that that actually worked.
The system will now only boot into emergency mode and the journal has error messages about attempting to access the data drive. However, the boot hard drive seems to be intact, since the logon screen is displayed (the stylized 7) and I have found the /etc/fstab file, listing the data drive mount info, using the command line interface. I cannot mount the device manually (mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb /mnt/WD500); mount cannot seem to find an ext4 file system.

Here's hoping.

I should add... this system is a personal one, used only by me in the home.

Original post was 10.22 am. At 18.00, no reply. This doesn't look good.

[aks]

Assuming you've overwritten from the beginning of the disk, you've probably wiped out most the metadata. On GPT partitions there is a backup at the end of the disk, I can't remember for MBR partitions.
Either way, you've probably overwritten data with zeros. Your best bet is to contact a data recovery company (who cost $$$) to see if they can reconstruct what was there.

[louarnold]

Assuming you've overwritten from the beginning of the disk, you've probably wiped out most the metadata. On GPT partitions there is a backup at the end of the disk, I can't remember for MBR partitions.
Either way, you've probably overwritten data with zeros. Your best bet is to contact a data recovery company (who cost $$$) to see if they can reconstruct what was there.

Thanks, but I thought I would use TestDisk to try to recover the partition fist. I will need some help if you have experience. See the title "Help! TestDisk usage for data hard drive recovery?"

[may24]

Forget it ... if you've already written 4GB's of zeros ... I don't know how much data was on that drive but that has killed a lot.
And AFIK it's not eays to recover stuff from an USB/SDD drive.
Since they're not magnetically based, you can't scann for remanent magnetization.
I'm afraid the data is gone ...

[louarnold]

I'm afraid the data is gone ...

Yep, it is gone, mostly anyway. Couldnt even delete it. I finally just reformatted it.
Thanks for your help anyway.