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how does one un dd a hard drive? [Debian 12 - Bookworm] (self.techsupport)

submitted 1 year ago by laverabe to c/techsupport

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

...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?

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[–] sleepmode 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I used something called GetDataBack at an old MSP. If the file system is supported, it might work. It takes an extremely long time to run… just fyi. I usually duplicated the troublesome drive beforehand to an identical or larger sized one just in case.

[–] laverabe 3 points 1 year ago

I looked up alternates to that to see if there is anything officially in the Debian repos, and there is something called Sleuth Kit / Autopsy for hard drive data recovery. I'll give that a shot when I get a chance, looks like it might take awhile but it's a good learning experience, even if there's nothing that important that I lost. Thanks for the tip!