Accidentally began cloning a hard drive, data now inaccessible

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PHPHPH

Commendable
Jul 11, 2016
2
0
1,510
I screwed up really, really, really badly.

I have a two-slot hard drive cloning bay. I was using it as just an easy external hard drive dock to read data off of hard drives I have lying around. The other day, I needed to move the dock from one place to another. As I was moving it, I accidentally pressed the "clone drive" button on the dock. I immediately pulled the drives out, but that second was apparently long enough to make my data inaccessible on the hard drive that was in the clone-to slot.

It will power on, and Disk Management in Windows is showing it as having two ~1tb partitions now (the hard drive in the clone-from slot is a 1tb, this now ruined drive is a 2tb). When I bring the drive online and attempt to access it, I get the following error:

"G:\ is not accessible. The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable"

But I think (hope) the underlying data is still intact...

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can recover it?

Thanks in advance!
 
Solution
Boogieman_WD
Hey there, PHPHPH.

Well it's really a bad situation. However, pulling the drive out of the docking station immediately might have save your data. Unfortunately you'll have to use data recovery and hope that it is capable to detect your old data so that you can recover it: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecovery/tp/free-file-recovery-programs.htm.
If that doesn't prove useful, I'm afraid that you'll have to go with a data recovery company.

The best case scenario is for the cloning process to have reformatted the drive and changed the partition without cloning anything.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

Judicious
Jul 31, 2014
6,050
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35,960
Hey there, PHPHPH.

Well it's really a bad situation. However, pulling the drive out of the docking station immediately might have save your data. Unfortunately you'll have to use data recovery and hope that it is capable to detect your old data so that you can recover it: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecovery/tp/free-file-recovery-programs.htm.
If that doesn't prove useful, I'm afraid that you'll have to go with a data recovery company.

The best case scenario is for the cloning process to have reformatted the drive and changed the partition without cloning anything.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD
 
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Solution
P

PHPHPH

Commendable
Jul 11, 2016
2
0
1,510
Thank you for the suggestion, Boogieman. I went down the list and tried both Recuva and Pruran. Recuva didn't find anything, unfortunately. Pruran, however, manged to recover quite a lot. It looks like it was able to recover anything that fit into the first partition the cloning process started making, as it found exactly 931GB of data. I haven't gone through and looked for what's missing yet, though.

I'll keep playing around with this and see if any of these programs will poke around the second partition.

Thanks for all your help!
 
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Boogieman_WD

Boogieman_WD

Judicious
Jul 31, 2014
6,050
2
35,960
Sure thing. I hope you're able to get everything back.

I'd strongly recommend that you think of a backup option for your most important data. A personal cloud, or cloud service, or just an external drive, or another system's internal drive. Those are all viable options. Trust me, it's worth it to have a backup. You don't want to take the chance to have to resort to data recovery companies as it's never 100% guaranteed that you'll be able to get your data back. Plus, having a backup is waaaaaay more budget friendly than having to recover your data by going for professional help. :)

Cheers and good luck!
 
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