DBan oops

pezlin

pezlin

New Member
Hello All!

I've been using dban successfully for a few months now, but yesterday I kinda screwed up.

I've got an 80gig Western Digital as Primary Master and a 120gig Western Digital as the secondary. I only intended the 80 to get wiped, but I foolishly started dban using the pnrg 8. I realized it was doing both drives a few seconds later (after I saw both drives were being wiped). I immediately shut off the PC, unplugged the 120gig, and wiped the 80gig.

My problem is that my 120 hard drive was filled to the brim with media that I'd like to save - only now it appears as an unformatted HD. I'm sure that all of the information wasn't destroyed, but I'm curious if anyone has a clue what I could do to make my PC recognize the drive to backup whatever I can get my hands on.

Thanks in advance for the help and a kick ass program.

- Pez
 
Both copies of the MFT are likely hosed if you had an NTFS filesystem. I cannot find a tool for Microsoft Windows that can scrape files off a disk without an MFT.

If this happened to me, then I would visit http://www.linux-ntfs.org/ and investigate the inode dumping code.

Past that, a commercial data recovery service is likely your best choice.
 
I think it worked....

A friend turned me on to Hirens BootCD (I used version 7.3). Its got tons of utilities for PC recovery / tweaking / everything. I managed to use one of the partition recovery programs it included to recover the partition. It doesn't look like anything got lost.

Here's a link to Hiren's BootCD homepage link - looks like they're up to 7.6.

Maybe this should be stickied for future reference. I'm sure the only reason why any data was recovered was because I stopped dban before it could completely destory the unintended target. I have no idea how far dban has to go before Hiren's can't pull something back, but regardless - this might help other people who accidentally started to wipe their drive like me.

-pez
 
I knew it wasn't quite on the up 'n up... but I was running ethereal on my network... didn't pickup any activity whilst it was running. Maybe the websites that host it can't be trusted... I always try running things in my sandbox before I let them loose in my network

I guess its a use at your own risk piece o' software.

-pez
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top