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I was trying to install a hard drive by following the InstallingANewHardDrive guide on help.ubuntu.com, but I accidentally formatted my 2 TB external hard drive instead of my 1 TB internal hard drive.

I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 and I have 3 hard drives:

  1. 80gb Intel SSDSC2BW080A4 (DC22) master boot record

  2. ST1000DM003-1ER162 (CC43) GUID Partition Table (the one i wanted to install and mount)

  3. My 2 TB Segate external Hard Drive that now is inaccessible and formatted.

When i go to my disks tool and choose this hard drive it tells me that its 1.6% full, which sounds like good news to me.

I read a couple of different post look into some programs but I'm not really sure how to proceed.

results of the deep analysis with testdisk

Disk /dev/sdc - 2000 GB / 1863 GiB - CHS 243201 255 63

The harddisk (2000 GB / 1863 GiB) seems too small! (< 17833196 TB / 16219197 TiB Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings, BIOS detection...

The following partitions can't be recovered:

Partition Start End Size in sectors

VMFS 38417 201 39 3789016855 14 45 3924794316768135

SysV 4 49694 147 2 7723719 218 31 123283216128 [^\%^DK]

VMFS 138906 191 51 3432453218 29 16 34830459532972999

XFS 4 179830 196 24 1053386502 20 50 17956568663837018 [~[JR4

NTFS 243201 0 63 486402 0 62 3907024065

i probably should have mentioned that im very new to this. so cant really make sense of any of that.

user575677
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2 Answers2

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Well, you could get some of the files back by scanning the drive with forensic tools. But other then this I think it's not possible that easy. The mkfs tools overwrite specific sections for file system information. without a backup of these blocks I believe its not possible to restore the structure of the old file system. What I like to do is not to install OS on hard-drive. Use a usb-thumb flash-drive. It's easy to do an image-backup then and in such situations you can simply do a dd back to the usb-thumb :) Sorry to not provide you a better solution.

0x0C4
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  • Thank you. i think i did the damage with the gparted application not the mk command. – user575677 Aug 02 '16 at 12:50
  • Well then it's easy as long you know the old partion configuration (address of the start block for each partition). – 0x0C4 Aug 03 '16 at 10:42
  • «scanning the drive with forensic tools» It would be much better to include instructions in the answer on *how* to do what you are suggesting. In the current form, the answer is basically "use tools to recover the data"... OK, what tools? How are they used? – Andrea Lazzarotto Aug 03 '16 at 12:51
  • Well coming from " I accidentally formatted" to "I delete my partition table" makes it hard to say "use this tool and this is how it works". "A problem well stated is a problem half-solved." Charles Kettering – 0x0C4 Aug 04 '16 at 13:08
  • I formatted my whole external hard drive. i thought that was clear with the topic. Then again a lot of the stuff i have being reading talks about deleting a partition so am no sure if this is the same. Should i change something in thewayi wrote my post. Thanks for your time. – user575677 Aug 06 '16 at 03:00
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You can use forensic tools and try recover at least some of the data. My experience with those was very mixed as the results you will be getting will be a big pile of data, some of which will even be broken. Nonetheless they can really recover your important data. (And recover the data to a new disk and not the one you are about to examine)

More information on file recovery including many tools can be found in the Arch Linux Wiki

matt3o
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  • Thank you. I started following this post. I'm not sure if is the same and the solutions will apply considering i formatted a whole drive not just deleted a partition. Am running a deep analysis with testdisk 6.14 and see what comes out. It looks like is going to be a long wait so ill read the link and try to learn something – user575677 Aug 03 '16 at 03:42
  • Looks good and Testdisk surely is a good choice. If you didn't overwrite any of the data yet it could rediscover the partition and rescue most of the data. Keep me posted - I'm really interested if it works for your problem. – matt3o Aug 03 '16 at 07:38