Re: [Trisquel-users] I accidentally burned an ISO to a flash drive containing files.

[marioxcc0]

You have overwritten a part or the whole of your filesystem with the ISO  
file, so some or most files are gone. Some files may be in a part unaffected  
by uploading the ISO image to the flash storage, but the previous filesystem  
is destroyed, so you will only be able to recover some files (If any at all)  
with disk recovery tools. First take a backup of your flash storage, with  
something like "dd if=DEVICE of=~/flash_memory_backup bs=64K; chmod a-w  
~/flash_memory_backup" and make a copy on which you will make the recovery  
effrots "cp ~/flash_memory_backup ~/flash_memory_working". Then run PhotoRec  
on the working copy. I think that this will recover some files, and also most  
files stored in the ISO image you uploaded to the flash memory. Some  
recovered files may be corrupt, and there's no automated way to tell for sure  
unless you have a list of hashes of them (Generated with "md5sum" for  
instance) or similar (compressed files almost always include a hash to check  
for corruption, the only exception I know is is the deprecated "LZMA alone  
format" (.lzma files)). So you must check that they have been recovered  
sucessfully. File names not be recovered if you use PhotoRec (remember, the  
filesystem is badly damaged, so there's no easy way to recover them), you  
will have to manually rename the files to their original filesnames if you  
want, and if you remember them. Don't discard your backup copy. My  
recommendation is to store it as long as the lost or not yet recovered  
information is important to you, so that you will be able to use new tools as  
they're developed (possibly by you) to recover more information from it.  
However, some files are definitely gone or at least not recoverable by  
software-only tools: those that used to be on the byte locations overwritten  
by the ISO image.

I hope that it helps, regards.


Regards.