Partition Recovery

I have a 2 TB Seagate Sata drive (Model # ST320005N4A1AS-RK
Barracuda).

I am using it on a PC using Windows XP, SP3. Recently, I was using a
new piece of software to backup a 20 GB drive to it. I mistakenly
‘copied the partition’ and the result was that it wrote over the
existing partition on the 2 TB drive instead and created a new one. I
haven’t copied files to it in hopes of recovering my files and folders
on the drive. I am trying to remove/erase the new partition.

I’ve tried some recovery programs that claim to be able to do the job
with no success. Is there any software that can REALLY help in this
type of situation?

JohnB wrote

I have a 2 TB Seagate Sata drive (Model # ST320005N4A1AS-RK Barracuda).

I am using it on a PC using Windows XP, SP3. Recently, I was using
a new piece of software to backup a 20 GB drive to it. I mistakenly
‘copied the partition’ and the result was that it wrote over the
existing partition on the 2 TB drive instead and created a new one.

I haven’t copied files to it in hopes of recovering my files and
folders on the drive. I am trying to remove/erase the new partition.

I’ve tried some recovery programs that claim to be able to do the job

Not with that particular problem they dont.

with no success. Is there any software that can REALLY help in this type of situation?

Fraid not, particularly when the partition that you copied is something like the
size of the 2TB drive you copied it to.

If its much smaller than 2TB drive you copied it to, the remains of the
partition you copied over should still be there. Its very difficult to recover
any of the files from the remains tho, you need a recovery system that just
scans thru the sectors looking for file headers and recovers files that way.

And even then, if the 2TB drive had just one partition on it and the drive
was mostly empty, the partition you copied to it may well have written
over almost all or all of the data on the 2TB drive, so the remains of
the overwritten partition may well just be free space, so there isnt
anything any recovery system can do to recover whats been overwritten.

On the other hand, if the partition you copied to the 2TB drive didnt have
much in it and you didnt use a sector by sector copy of the partition,
its possible that there might be some of the original contents of the
2TB in what is free space on the copy of the partition and its possible
that at least some of those files might be recoverable by a recovery
system that scans for file headers in free space.

JohnB wrote:
I have a 2 TB Seagate Sata drive (Model # ST320005N4A1AS-RK
Barracuda).

I am using it on a PC using Windows XP, SP3. Recently, I was using a
new piece of software to backup a 20 GB drive to it. I mistakenly
?copied the partition? and the result was that it wrote over the
existing partition on the 2 TB drive instead and created a new one. I
haven?t copied files to it in hopes of recovering my files and folders
on the drive. I am trying to remove/erase the new partition.

I?ve tried some recovery programs that claim to be able to do the job
with no success. Is there any software that can REALLY help in this
type of situation?

If you overwrote the first 20GB, then that data is gone and
no software can do anything about it.

There may be some possibility to recover data in other areas,
but keeop in mind that automated recovery software is only
for the really, really easy recovery jobs.

Arno
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Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
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