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Yes, the old story: Trying to create an image of a partition to save in a different location... the accident is/was cloning to an external drive instead of the intended location and now the external drive has lost its structure and data.

I was trying to make an image of a partition and save it to an external hard drive. I (somewhat) followed the directions on this post: Cloning with DD command while also using these and other commands such as dd if=/dev/sda1 of=~/disk2.img but my attempt was a big fail not to mention a lost of my hard drive.

After I typed the command, dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/(forgot the drive here) repeatedly and with different parameters, I realized the destination was wrong. Even worst, in the process of copying I thought I had stopped it by pressing Control + C then I unplugged the drive. I was wrong.

Now my external drive is screwed up. It is not being recognized by Linux or other OSs. Linux gives me an error when plugging the h.d. in. See image below.

So, can the cloning be undone or do I have to opt for data recovery? Is my hard drive ruined?

Although this error was not my intention, an answer on this post makes me think this is what happened to my drive.

enter image description here

Community
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LittleTIME
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1 Answers1

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Not really.

Cloning writes raw blockdata to your drive, making it extremely hard to recover information if you choose a bad path.

That said, you might be able to send it off to a professional data recovery team, but that's expensive and there's no guarantee that it'll work.

To recover your drive to a usable state, simply open up GParted or your Disk utility and create a new partition on your drive.

Recovering data itself might be possible in very rare conditions, if by some miracle you stopped the clone before it reached into a second partition. If this is the case, you'd just have to rebuild the partition tables in their exact position. Unfortunately, this is harder than it looks and is usually impossible.

Finally, there have been some reports of photorec working, but that isn't the norm. YMMV.

dd is very often and aptly referred to as Disk Destroyer. Take extra care when using that command.

Kaz Wolfe
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