cgsecurity.org

Hello

In short, I copied my 2TB HDD to a new 4TB HDD, and then the data from first copy copied to second 4TB HDD with ddrescue. And the idea was to recover the partitions or data. Original drive was used in windows as a storage drive, and accidentally formatted in live linux to ext4, but no data was written over other than the linux installation setup.

Two days ago, finally the first copy of the disk completed with ddrescue (using this command: sudo ddrescue -d -f -r3 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc sdc.log) . The original drive is 2TB and the target drive is a 4TB HDD.

Then I made a second copy again with ddrescue to another 4TB drive with this command, ddrescue -d -f -s 2000408934016 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc sdc.log. I took the size of the original drive as was mentioned in the smarttools.

After first copying was complete, I removed the original drive so sdb in first copy is not sdb in the second copy, and used new log files. The second copy went very smooth and finished within 3 hours.

After the copying, I tried to run the TestDisk if I can recover any partitions, but TestDisk didn't recognize any NTFS partitions after deepscan. It does mention a FAT32 partition at start and a linux partition of 4TB.

Am I missing something here? or there was no data copied at all? Does it have to do something with the partition table, a backup of something?

Kind regards
Irfan

7.4.2023 recuperation: moved posting from new thread to old thread and deleted one line

Unfortunately you did everything wrong.

1. You failed to check your SMART parameters in the beginning which would have suggested to duplicate the drive.
2. You "formatted the drive" suggests that you formatted the only partition on this drive and deleted data this way. => data destruction
3. You installed Ubuntu on it overwriting even more. => data destruction
4. You tortured your drive by having a recovery software searching on it.

It does not come as a surprise that Testdisk finds nothing pointing out to the former NTFS partition.

Next step would be to have a commercial software search on one of your duplicate disks. If that fails use Photorec. If your data is fragmented the chances of Photorec will degrade.

If you want to provide a learning experience for the readers of this forum (and yourself, of course) just reread the SMART parameters of your failing drive again - nothing more - and post them here. I would give a comment on the difference.

You are right, well I didn't know much and in this process, I actually learned a lot.
I can't afford to send the drive to a recovery centre, and in the beginning I also panicked. I never used Linux for that long but now I am running Linux Mint for straight two months, learned many linux tricks and stuff too. And if it happens again, I do have some idea what to do.

Today, I tried to run PhotoRec, and it is scanning and reading lot of files and photos. So everything is not lost at the moment, I think we will recover some stuff out of it.

Once it is done, I will run smarttools on original drive again (at the moment it is not connected to PC) and update the post.

Kind regards