Accidently formated external hard disk with live OS

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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krillin666
Posts: 1
Joined: 02 Jul 2018, 11:49

Accidently formated external hard disk with live OS

#1 Post by krillin666 »

Hello all, I accidentally formatted my 1TB Toshiba external hard disk while creating a live OS bootable usb with Fedora OS, I misclicked and selected my external disk instead of the usb pen. Now my external disk is shown as unallocated and the only files there are the live Fedora OS ones.
I had about 250GB of very important files in that drive, so before doing anything with testdisk or photorec I'm asking for your guidance to the best approach possible, before messing up even more.
If more information is needed, please ask.

Thank you.

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cgrenier
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Re: Accidently formated external hard disk with live OS

#2 Post by cgrenier »

The best will be to
- recover the partition using TestDisk (Analyse, Quick Search, Stop, Deeper Search, select the old partition, set it as P(rimary), on next screen, Write, confirm, Quit
- recover the files using PhotoRec
If TestDisk failed to recover the old partition, run PhotoRec, enable the Expert mode, start a recovery, use a blocksize of 512, use the default options otherwise.

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