Great Mistake using DBAN

P

pallaccha

New Member
I'm newbie on this forum.

I found eraser by google searching and I tryed it to erase all contents of my 4GB CF Card. I made a bootable floppy DBAN and booted from it, but when I was prompetd to select where apply the wiping, misled from the words "SCSI ..." I selected unconsciously the data partition of my pc's HD, thinking was the built-in multicard reader of the pc.
I realized it when wiping had already started. I stopped it when was less then 1%. Obviously partition is now unusable. I tryed to recover it using NTFS.COM Active Partition Recovery but seem to be free of any data.
How is it possible that a 39GB partition was empty after a 1% of wiping?

Data stored in this partition are work's data and are too and too important for me!

What I can do to recover at least some of these?

HELP ME, PLEASE!!!

Thank you in advance!
Michael
 
It won't help - the first few hundred megabytes of the disk are where the all-important data structures used for maintaining disk integrity are held. If those are gone, you really are unable to recover the information (easily).

If your information is worth more than an investment, then prepare to get some money and pay a professional disk-recovery service to recover your data. Their success may vary, after all, Eraser (and DBAN) was meant to deter these people from getting your data.

Also for this particular use-case you didn't have to use DBAN, Eraser would have been good enough.

Joel

P/s please don't sticky unless instructed to.
 
I seen something similar happen on a customer site where someone had left an NTServer Build disk in the CD of a compaq server. Yep, you've probably guessed that when it was rebooted, it started to rebuild and although the engineer fought to bring the build to a halt, he'd already started it so ended up in the same position as our learned friend is now. Boot information from the disk already overwritten and is unrecoverable by conventional means.

You may as well rebuild, then recover from your backups. After all, work data which is "too and too important for you to lose" will be backed up ready to be restored and would go through regular Disaster Recovery testing, yes?

If not, you're probably going to have to splash out on a little professional data recovery. Thankfully, it's classed as a 'basic recovery' and is pretty easy for them to get back for you.
 
I won't be too sure if it will be still be classed as basic - he may have already written the first few hundred MB with the strong erasure pass...

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