Just wiped out a 500GB HDD and don't have anything big enough to recover to. Help?

I fucked up a batch script and wound up deleting everything on my drive. The folder structure is still intact, but the files are all deleted. I have not written anything to the drive at all since this happened. It's a USB drive and I disconnected it immediately once I realized what I did.

Normally when files are recovered from a hard drive, you gotta select a different drive as your target for recovery so that you don't overwrite any data. Are there any ways to recover the data without having to do that? My drive is a 500GB external hard drive and has ~440GB worth of files that need to be recovered. I don't have anything else that could store those.

I would imagine that it would be possible for a program to index the drive and use the blank space to recover any files, as long as it has enough free space to temporarily store any file that might be recovered.


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

XOXO :heart:


PS-
In case you're wondering, my batch script had a variable set as a static path with a slash, then another variable with a relative path. So it looked something like ( %DrivePath%\%RelativePath % ). Well, when my script was calling the different functions (Yes, I use functions in batch files. Go me.), one of my conditional statements was messed up and the two variables became empty. Thus, my DEL command was set to "\". Final summation: Don't fucking run a god damned delete script unless you're absolutely sure it won't delete the wrong fucking files. Ugh!

Sorry to hear about your situation.

My honest recommendation to you would be to fork out 100$ or so on another drive to do a hardware level sector by sector backup to another drive. This would, among other things, maintain the forensic integrity of your original drive.

The deletion you did hasn't actually deleted any files at all, it has just marked places on the drive as empty. Theoretically, this would just require an undelete operation to reverse this process. I don't know of a utility off the top of my head that will do this. I'm sure there is something on the UBCD. I will follow up when I find an appropriate utility.

Buy a drive from a retailer, recover, move it back to the old drive, format the new drive and return it.

Put the drive in a computer and run Active File Recovery Pro (http://www.file-recovery.net/) on it.

I was able to get a lot (indeed, nearly everything) off a drive that had lost its partition table.

Once you figure out if this simple process works or not, you can resort to more drastic measures.

Put the drive in a computer and run Active File Recovery Pro (http://www.file-recovery.net/) on it.

I was able to get a lot (indeed, nearly everything) off a drive that had lost its partition table.

Once you figure out if this simple process works or not, you can resort to more drastic measures.
As a precaution, Active@ File Recovery warns you if you try to recover files back into the same drive. A newly created file might overwrite (in whole or in some part) the deleted file during the recovery process, or the contents of other deleted files may be overwritten. Always undelete files to another logical removable, floppy or network drive.

That's what I'm trying to avoid, but it's looking like it's unaviodable. :\

Yeah, sorry man, the only way you could have worked something out is if you'd had set off a smaller partition on the same drive before hand. Then you'd have a block of space unused by your main partition that you could have recovered stuff to, obviously the second partition wouldn't match the 500 of the full drive, but you could recover things in chunks to burn to a DVD or something.

If anything this experience should teach you to back stuff up before you run your new scripts, heh.

It took over 60 hours, but I was able to get everything recovered to my buddy's drive. I'm copying it all back over to my drive now.

I think from now on I'm going to test my scripts in a VM. ;o

glad to hear it worked out for you. :)