USB hard drive not seen by file managers after flub. Need to save or copy data from it....
by brjoon1021 from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5FWBC)
Hi,
I am nervous and up the proverbial creek without a paddle. If this is the wrong place for this please put it in the right forum. If any of you can VPN and fix this for me, message me and we can talk money.
I wanted to make a USB live distro using MX Linux's "MX Linux Live USB maker"
Well... I screwed up by having the target and the source reversed. I need to recover the data from what should have been the source (a large 2 TB USB drive). It kind of ended up being the target - but not really... read on...
I have done this well over a dozen times without hitch but this time I had the small thumb drive and the 2 TB external hard drive (targe and source) reversed in the live USB disk maker. There was a warning saying the target drive was larger than 128 GB or something like that and "did I want to continue ?" I knew what that meant and I selected "No" or "close" or whatever would keep it from writing over the large drive with a linux distro, but something still happened in an instant. The larger drive (which has data on it that I do not want to lose) was still rendered unseeable by Dolphin or other file managers.
I looked at the same drive in windows and it is not visible with Windows explorer but shows up as unallocated in windows "disk management". I was able to see some of my folders in the "trash" of the drive so it at least was not blanked entirely. There is over 100 GB of data. It could not have been wiped out in a second, but access to it has been marred by my flub.
This is over my head. I think the device is ext4 (if I reformatted it from it NTFS or exFAT) may still be exfat or NTFS if I did not reformat it.
There was only an instant between the time the dialog warning from MX Linux came up saying that the larger drive was the one on the guillotine to be turned into a usb bootable live distro. This is a platter drive. There is no way that much data could have been touched in an instant.
What can I do ?
I am nervous and up the proverbial creek without a paddle. If this is the wrong place for this please put it in the right forum. If any of you can VPN and fix this for me, message me and we can talk money.
I wanted to make a USB live distro using MX Linux's "MX Linux Live USB maker"
Well... I screwed up by having the target and the source reversed. I need to recover the data from what should have been the source (a large 2 TB USB drive). It kind of ended up being the target - but not really... read on...
I have done this well over a dozen times without hitch but this time I had the small thumb drive and the 2 TB external hard drive (targe and source) reversed in the live USB disk maker. There was a warning saying the target drive was larger than 128 GB or something like that and "did I want to continue ?" I knew what that meant and I selected "No" or "close" or whatever would keep it from writing over the large drive with a linux distro, but something still happened in an instant. The larger drive (which has data on it that I do not want to lose) was still rendered unseeable by Dolphin or other file managers.
I looked at the same drive in windows and it is not visible with Windows explorer but shows up as unallocated in windows "disk management". I was able to see some of my folders in the "trash" of the drive so it at least was not blanked entirely. There is over 100 GB of data. It could not have been wiped out in a second, but access to it has been marred by my flub.
This is over my head. I think the device is ext4 (if I reformatted it from it NTFS or exFAT) may still be exfat or NTFS if I did not reformat it.
There was only an instant between the time the dialog warning from MX Linux came up saying that the larger drive was the one on the guillotine to be turned into a usb bootable live distro. This is a platter drive. There is no way that much data could have been touched in an instant.
What can I do ?