failed cloning.. please read

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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juraviel
Posts: 2
Joined: 08 May 2017, 18:56

failed cloning.. please read

#1 Post by juraviel »

Hello. Ok so I've made a pretty massive mistake using another software, ddrescue, to try and salvage a failing drive by cloning a small partition. What I didn't realize is, it was actually replacing the old data with the new, I think at least, my old/destination partition is gone (there's just unallocated space in it's place). I don't know what to do, I'm not an expert, testdisk is just giving me warnings about the number of heads/cylinder mismatched, then in the end shows that the drive is too small (?), <499GB. And under it that partition is not recovarable. But it must be.. sorry I don't know how to attach a screenshot on the parted magic distro I'm using to try and fix all this

If I try and list the files there's just one folder, which really worries me. I hope the other software didn't erase it, I stopped quite soon when I saw it wasn't making fast progress. When I reboot, it detects win10 which was installed on it (the overwritten disk). I really hope you can help me, all help is greatly appreciated

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cgrenier
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Re: failed cloning.. please read

#2 Post by cgrenier »

If you have use the wrong destination when using ddrescue, this destination has been overwritten. No data can be recovered from the overwritten area.
To recover data from the remaining disk space, use PhotoRec, enable the expert mode in Options. Start the recovery of the whole disk, choose a blocksize of 512 bytes,
use the default options otherwise.

juraviel
Posts: 2
Joined: 08 May 2017, 18:56

Re: failed cloning.. please read

#3 Post by juraviel »

I'm very glad you responded, thank you

So I did as you said, unfortunately, only half of the data from the partition was recovered, and it's all renamed files in changed directories. That's a lot of damage for 2.07MB of overwritten data (as I now checked). Can it be that the parameters weren't right? What's the reason for nonstandard 512bytes block size? Something else I can do? Thanks

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cgrenier
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Re: failed cloning.. please read

#4 Post by cgrenier »

Can you post the testdisk.log file content after using TestDisk, Analyze, QUick Search and Deeper Search ?
Please tell which partitions (name, type, size) you want to recover.

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