Image Writer

Recover External Hard Drive

Asked by P. Stern

Hello,
Please help me not freak out. I started to flash an image and directed it to the wrong drive letter. I noticed a few seconds into it and cancelled the operation. It looks like it wrote about 70 MB onto my 1 Terabyte drive. I read in your support files that you could just delete the small partition using admin tools, which I did. Now I am being prompted to format the drive, which I do not want to do because this is my data drive and I need all of the data on it. Can you tell me how to recover? I'm guessing that I just need to fix a header of some sort?

Please let me know and thank you in advance for your help.

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Answered
For:
Image Writer Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Jeff B (skydiver38) said : 		#1

I'm not a data recovery expert, but I think it would be quite a process to rebuild a drive without destroying what's on it. I imagine that you need to send it to a data recovery service.

I *have* added some info to the "Are you sure you want to write this image" warning message that re-displays the drive letter and the label of that drive (if it has one) as a way of trying to prevent mistakes like this one (same thing happened to a guy I work with, who then requested that feature). That doesn't help your situation, but perhaps going forward it will be more obvious before something drastic happens. Unfortunately, if a drive is removable and/or USB, it shows up as a choice to write too - ImageWriter can't know that you don't *really* want to write to that drive.

I've thought about adding some sort of "ignore drives larger than X" configuration item, but haven't looked into that too deeply, nor talked to Tobin about it...

Revision history for this message
Scott Heath (sheath-r) said : 		#2

I found this message when I searched for anything on recovering a drive that ImageWriter had written to by mistake. If the situation really is hopeless, let me add to the voices calling for more warnings in the software noting the size and name of the targeted volume. I had no idea that IW was writing to my USB-mounted hard drive and not the sdcard reader.

Revision history for this message
Jonathan (jonathan-winney) said : 		#3

I've just done the same to my 300GB USB hard drive! Please Please put some more checks in place.
These can be as simple as:
1) Drive bigger than your average SD card - 32GB?
Warning, this drive is xxx GB in size, are you sure?
2) Data usage on the target drive
Target drive contains xxx GB of data, are you sure? or The target drive is xx% full of data, are you sure?

I'd rather be nagged to death than go through the hours of data recovery I'm currently having to do - and I have no idea what I'm going to be able to get back that's useful, especially if the filenames and folder structures are gone.

Revision history for this message
Jonathan (jonathan-winney) said : 		#4

The other option would be to prevent writing unless the target drive is empty, with an override option if necessary.

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask P. Stern for more information if necessary.

To post a message you must log in.