good day all
I am a slightly losing my mind at the moment. I recently bought a flashdrive for backup livecd/rescue purposes,but I am a day to late.
I have an external hard drive, 2TB Seagate - file system = NTFS with a single partition, MBR type.
While trying to format my flashdrive to gpt for reasons, the software defults to the first attached USB device, which is my external, and without realising it, I formated my external (95% full with data) to a single GPT:NTFS file system.
I immediately started a partition recovery, but to my understanding, changing the mbr/gpt does not actually affect the data. I stopped the recovery, deleted the gpt:ntfs partition, changed back to mbr:ntfs and started a recovery.
Here is the intesting bit, I have a copy of Active Partition Recovery, so I started that up, and did a full "cylinder/deep" scan, it showed multiple partitions each with its recovery possibility. My partition label "Ext" was an excellent recovery possibility, when I selected to recover data in-place/restoring partition records,etc it reported that this "Ext" partitin (which is the one I need to recover) was a logical partition and that I need to use chkdisk to check for errors, else I can remove the partition and replace it with the found "Ext" partition records. Which is what I did (2 times) and after it mounted in Windows, an empty drive.
Using 2 other freeware, which seemed remarkably similar in interface and options but from different companies, both reported a "System" partition which is the gpt:ntfs partition name I formated to (the cause of the problem) and +/- 665 logical partitions ranging from64Mb to +/- 100 kb in size were also listed, but not the Ext partition
I am considering doing a RAW data recovery/salvaging files but at present done own another 2Tb, I am scaning my drive in linux using testdisk, but assuming the worst, I'll have to buy another hard drive
Is there any recommendation/resolution for this, to restore the original Ext partition or recover the data from that partition instead of copying/salvaging those files since my hard drive was quite full (+/-95%)?