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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Accidentally wrote an ISO to an encrypted 5TB drive… Help? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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 22 hours ago

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.