Ran dban on my harddrive for about 10 seconds

[alwayssummer]

Hello. I ran dban on my old laptop and I did not realize that it would wipe all attached harddrives. As soon as I saw that it was working on more than one drive I turned off the PC, but it was too late.

Now my hard drive shows up as unallocated space.

After much internet research I was pointed to ZAR. They said there is some chance ZAR could get my data back. I ran a scan over the weekend to find lost partitions, and it found many of them, but none of them were anywhere near the correct size. I'm not sure what to do next.

Should I select the largest one it found? It is only 126GB, but my harddrive is 500GB. I'm not sure what to do here. I don't want to click anything because I'm afraid I will lost this list that took so long to generate.

Edit: 500GB USB HardDrive was NTFS before I messed it up.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

DBAN is a secure erase tool. If it worked long enough, the data cannot be recovered (this is the very purpose of secure erase).

To still try a recovery, you need to start ZAR, proceed to the list of physical disks, pick your 500GB drive, then in the partitions list right click the empty space and select "Define volume manually" from the menu.

The window will open asking for the parameters. In that window select "There was only one volume" and click OK.

You will be back to the list and the new partition will be listed, occupying the entire disk. Scan it.

External drives are typically not partitioned, i.e. only contain one "partition".

[alwayssummer]

Thank you Alexey. I was hoping most of my data would be intact because it never even reaches 1%, so I think probably it never got to data.

I started the scan last night but it seems to be stuck. It has my processor pegged, but does not appear to actually process any data. The status bar shows 0.0 MB/s. Does it need more time or is this an error?



UPDATE: I killed ZAR. It did not create a log file on that run. I turned up the logging options and started it again. Seems to be working better this time.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

If you run normal logging, the log is buffered, so the last entires do not get to the log file in case of a crash. Debug logging is not buffered, so the log is complete at any given moment you look at it.