this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

If it wasnt encrypted you could have used testdisk app but I dont see how you could decrypt it in this state