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I was messing around, creating an XP thumb drive for an old netbook and wrote the .iso to the wrong drive - my 1TB external with all my backup data. I have written about 800MB at the beginning of the disk. There was about 250GB of data on the disk and a bunch of empty space, all on one partition. I used Testdisk to try and recover the partition and file system, but I wasn't sure if it worked, so I have begun using PhotoRec on the entire drive which will take about 16 days on my system. I have a couple of questions.

It now appears that my drive has shown up on the desktop with its correct label, ready to be mounted. Is it possible that with Testdisk I was successful in restoring access to the drive (minus what was overwritten, of course)?

Is it safe to stop PhotoRec to see if I can mount the drive, and restart PhotoRec later? Will it start where it left off?

Should I just suck it up and let PhotoRec run for 16 days?

Thank you for your input!

MoogusShow wrote: 23 Mar 2020, 14:37 I was messing around, creating an XP thumb drive for an old netbook and wrote the .iso to the wrong drive - my 1TB external with all my backup data. I have written about 800MB at the beginning of the disk. There was about 250GB of data on the disk and a bunch of empty space, all on one partition. I used Testdisk to try and recover the partition and file system, but I wasn't sure if it worked, so I have begun using PhotoRec on the entire drive which will take about 16 days on my system. I have a couple of questions.

It now appears that my drive has shown up on the desktop with its correct label, ready to be mounted. Is it possible that with Testdisk I was successful in restoring access to the drive (minus what was overwritten, of course)?

There is no "one fits all" answer. Try Testdisk out, recover files and try to open them with the associated application.

Is it safe to stop PhotoRec to see if I can mount the drive, and restart PhotoRec later? Will it start where it left off?

Check my recents posts in other threads.

Should I just suck it up and let PhotoRec run for 16 days?

Yes.