Image Writer

Nightmare - Wrong Drive! Everything Lost?

Asked by mars

Hello, I've always taken great care before using Image Writer, but somehow it went terribly wrong just 5 minutes ago. I tried putting an image on a 16gb microSD card, but the thing was on write protect. So I took it out, clicked the write protect off, put it back in and pressed 'write'. I realised almost immediately that Image Write flipped to the next drive, as I had taken out the SD card, and now had my 12TeraByte NAS drive (DROBO) and was writing an image to it. I cancelled it, and turned of my NAS and prayed it was not too late, but when it was back on, ALL of my content was gone.

In an instance I lost everything, so I hope you could help me: it went much too quick to have deleted or formatted the drives, so what happened? How can I undo it? HELP!?

Thank you,
Misery in Marseille

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Tobin Davis (gruemaster) said : 		#1

How was your NAS attached? USB? If it was setup as a true NAS, it would be network accessible and Win32DiskImager should not have even listed it as an option (and yes, the program does auto-refresh when removing and inserting removable devices - as it should).

The best bet for recovery is to look into some of the available data recovery tools available. Personally, I use Linux, so recovery is somewhat better (and I have been working with some drive internal formats since the late 80's). I don't have a simple recommendation for data recovery.

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mars (replica18) said : 		#2

Hai Tobin, thank you for your reply. It's a Drobo attached via USB, so not a 'true' NAS in that sense. It takes 4x3TB drives and creates a virtual single drive, with their own propriatory redundency (some kind of RAID I guess). This leaves me with 8.5TB, but it's accessible like a normal drive, and could therefor be affected by Win32DiskImage, as it has. But like I said, it happened in an instant, so I'm pretty sure all the data on there is still present, I just don't know how to recover it.

I'm a little concerned about using recovery tools, as I'm not sure really what Drobo does to make these 4 drives into 1, and I don't know what Image Writer has actually overwritten to make it inaccessible. I'm also running under Windows 7, which makes it less adaptable than a Linux distro.

I will start looking for recovery options and have contacted Drobo, hopefully they have an idea.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#3

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.