So, I did a thing - accidentally selected my 5TB external NTFS hard drive (encrypted with VeraCrypt) as the target for writing an ISO. The moment I noticed that “Impression” had switched the drive letter, I immediately killed the process. But yeah… damage done.
Now, the situation:
- Currently shows up as:
- 6 MB FAT
- 4.3 GB
- 2 TB unallocated
- 2.6TB unallocated
- The VeraCrypt volume obviously no longer mounts.
- Drive was somewhat crucial - lots of structured data I’d really prefer to recover with the original file system intact.
I know chances are slim, especially with encrypted volumes, but has anyone had luck recovering from something like this? I’m open to commercial recovery tools or command-line wizardry. Would love to hear from anyone who’s been down this road.
Any thoughts or recommendations?
I guess it’s a question of how much hassle it’s worth. I did a messy data recovery of a crashed database for a work client once, but it involved a lot of trial and error and writing special purpose code, plus considerable luck that some things worked better than I had a right to expect. Cost of something like that would be in the multi kilobucks, maybe low 5 figures. We got almost all the data back, though not 100%.
Maybe just put that HDD aside and replace it with a new one, and deal slowly with recovering the data as you get the time to mess with it. Also don’t do any write operations on the old drive. Maybe copy it entirely to someplace and work on the copy. In fact better do that anyway, HD’s physically crash all the time.