Help! I Formatted my /Backup Drive in Error

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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bibleman
Posts: 1
Joined: 06 May 2013, 13:44

Help! I Formatted my /Backup Drive in Error

#1 Post by bibleman »

Hello,

I mistakenly ran mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb on a backup Harddrive that contains data. When mounted, it was still showing 200gb space in use but I cannot find any files.

The Drive has now been unmounted and Testdisk cannot find any Partition. It only reads this info when scanning:

Linux 0 0 1 60801 80 63 976773168

Do I have any hope of getting my Data?

Thanks

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Fiona
Posts: 2835
Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 17:19
Location: Ludwigsburg/Stuttgart - Germany

Re: Help! I Formatted my /Backup Drive in Error

#2 Post by Fiona »

If you formatted a drive, then your partition should still exist?
Please upload a screen from TestDisk / Analyse to check your current partition table.
My experience is, if you formatted a partition to Linix file system like ext3, your underlying previous file system gets damaged, because an ext3 partition writes backup of superblocks all over the file system.
In case users got their data back using datarecovery software like photorec.
If you'd like to recover file names and directories, in this case, commercial software would be recommended.
You can test a trial first.

Fiona

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