…because I’m an idiot. Fortunately it was a backup drive, and I believe the only thing on it was backups of backups fortunately.

I was setting up to installing Debian on another computer and ran:

sudo dd bs=4M if=debian-12.4.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso of=/dev/s?? status=progress oflag=sync

to flash it to a usb drive. I hadn’t realized the system had reassigned hard drive device ID from the previous day, and for about 3 seconds it executed before I terminated the process once I realized what I did.

I immediately created a disk image of the Data-Destroyed hard drive just in case I screwed something up in trying to recover it.

I ran testdisk, but I’m not really sure how to use it or how to try to recover the data. The drive mounts okay, and shows it has 19,336 items totalling 8.2 GB of the Debian system files.

Is this beyond repair?

  • Kusuriya
    3•10 months ago

    A time machine barring that the data DD overwrote is gone. there are some theories around being able to recover things with an electron microscope but eh. You could repair the partition table and see what you can get back but its best to consider the data knackered. Sorry probably not what you want to hear but it is what it is.