Using Startup Disk Creator destroyed my disk partition!

Asked by adrian

GAAAAA!! HELP!!! I was trying to use Startup Disk Creator to create a boot partition on a drive that already had data on it.

I had a NTFS partition on a USB drive which I then shrunk by 1GB and and moved to the end of the disk using gparted. This worked fine. I did this because under Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04, it wouldn't allow me to click on the Make Startup Disk button, so I figured it required an empty partition. So by creating the 1GB partition, I figured I could click on the Erase Disk and it would be fine the 1GB, I WAS SO WRONG!!! It started to wipe the ENTIRE drive and I yanked the USB connector when I reaslised this.

I am hoping that it has not actually wiped the data, but just killed the partition table. My question now is, how do I recover from this? The drive is half a TB and I don't have a backup (it was the only disk I had :-( and I didn't plan for this contingency :-O)

Is there some way to fix this situation?

THANX!

A

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adrian
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said :
#1

Use your backups will be the easiest way by far.

You can also try foremost

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adrian (adrianh-bsc) said :
#2

"The drive is half a TB and I don't have a backup (it was the only disk I had :-( and I didn't plan for this contingency :-O)"

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adrian (adrianh-bsc) said :
#3

Can I not remount the partition by rebuilding the partition table? The main partition table may be gone, but does formatting actually wipe the rest of the data? Can I not just remount the drive by using some cylinder count or something? Is there not a way for scanning for that?

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adrian (adrianh-bsc) said :
#4

Found the solution. Looking up foremost, I found another page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery which mentions testdisk. Using that application, I was able to recover my drive.

Thanks for the help.

A