SOLVED

On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 8:48 PM, Arun Khan <[email protected]> wrote:
> The unthinkable happened.
>
> One of my junior engineer did a
>
>                            dd_rescue <some_iso_image>  /dev/sdc
>
> (instead of /dev/sdd) in a moment of haste
>
> /dev/sdc happens to be a 1TB HDD that held an ext4 partition and all
> my archives (~650GB) were on it.


>
> Any other suggestions welcome.
>

Thanks to all those who responded with suggestions.

Unfortunately, after a week of several tries, the suggested tools were
unable to recover anything intelligible.

I sent the disk to a "data recovery service."   They kept the disk for
about 12 days trying their software based tools and were not meeting
with much success.   When I told them to return the disk back, they
asked for 2 more days; apparently they a few more "ace" tools in their
toolbox.  A couple of days later I got a call that they had been able
to recover 560GB of data.   From what they reported it ran for a long
time (they would not disclose the exact duration).

When I visited their lab to verify the recovered data, the disk was
connected to a "special" card [1] running on a Windows 7 desktop.   I
guess the hardware/software combo went down to the sector level and
re-assembled the files.   Pretty much all the files (from what I could
recall) were there.    I got the files back on a NTFS formatted disk.
The cost was Rs. 12K.

[1] The only thing the lab technician was ready to disclose - that the
hardware had been imported card at considerable cost (Rs. 5 lacs) and
it came only with Windows drivers.

Lesson learnt:   Tread with extreme caution when you are using disk
and filesystem utility tools like dd, dd_rescue, fdisk, mkfs etc.
Review and confirm the "target" location *before* hitting the return
key!

-- Arun Khan
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