Is there any way to recover a partition after writing zeros with DLG?

[ENERGYDREAM2007]

Hello. iv an hdd recovery question(s) and i hope you have some resolution:


HDD: Western Digital - WD3200AAKS , its a 320GB 3.5\" drive (1 Partition on it that was NTFS with no OS on it - just important data like VMware projects)


OK so i guess you know the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tool by wd:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=606&sid=30&lang=en
The version iv used is the latest (witch is 5.04f).

(dont mind the drive listed)


The problem is i did have a failed drive (other wd drive) witch i wanted to Zero Fill it by this tool but by mistake i did it for my good & healthy WD3200AAKS drive mention above. I did the quick "Write Zeros To Drive" command without having noticed its the wrong drive until booted to the OS.


My question is:
Is there any way to recover the partition after running a Zero Fill command?

I did tried alot of recovering soft but its not working so good (from 320GB iv recovered something like 26GB witch are off course not in the original structure they were). i havnt find any software that can recover the ALL original partition data & the folder structure (or at least most of the data & the structure).


Can you advise on the next step man? how to recover the data?


TNX :]

 

[sub mesa]

Your data is gone, sorry.

Next time, disconnect any important disk before doing such an extremely dangerous procedure. Also i would recommend to start making backups and buying more HDDs to act as backup, making sure something like this can never cause you to lose data again.

 

[ENERGYDREAM2007]

Your data is gone, sorry.

Next time, disconnect any important disk before doing such an extremely dangerous procedure. Also i would recommend to start making backups and buying more HDDs to act as backup, making sure something like this can never cause you to lose data again.

Not true at all. if your read my post you will see that i DID recovered some of my data (true working files not RAW) but i need more then 26GB that iv recovered.

If anynone can help before il go to processional service il appropriate that

 

[sub mesa]

That's a contradiction in your own story. If you did perform a full zero-write on the disk, you would not be able to recover anything. If you could, then you either did not finish the zero-write or didn't do a zero-write at all.

Assuming you partially zero-written the disk, you can use various utilities to try to recover data; but it might be corrupt, have bad filenames of paths, or be incomplete. Full data recovery is not possible after overwriting stuff with zeroes; unless you pay billions to manual surface recovery which is something only NSA and the likes can do.

 

[ENERGYDREAM2007]

That's a contradiction in your own story. If you did perform a full zero-write on the disk, you would not be able to recover anything. If you could, then you either did not finish the zero-write or didn't do a zero-write at all.

Assuming you partially zero-written the disk, you can use various utilities to try to recover data; but it might be corrupt, have bad filenames of paths, or be incomplete. Full data recovery is not possible after overwriting stuff with zeroes; unless you pay billions to manual surface recovery which is something only NSA and the likes can do.

Man im telling you i did finish the Zero fill 100% with no termination whatsoever and succeeded in recovering small part of my files (witch highly suggest that im in no need to pay billions - but before i do pay something between 200-500 USD to a professional service that will do it successfully , i wanna try other solutions.

 

[sub mesa]

Well the problem is, that theoretically if you write zeroes to all sectors on your HDD, your data is gone. You cannot recover the overwritten contents by using software methods; and have to perform hardware recovery which is extremely expensive under these conditions.

Regardless, you can try different recovery software, i used @Active File Recovery which can search for $MFT records and thus can recover data from a partially corrupted/overwritten partition. The scanning may take a long time though, but give it a try.