I accidentally burned an ISO to a flash drive containing files.

3 respuestas [Último envío]
pogiako12345
Desconectado/a
se unió: 07/11/2014

The last time I was able to open it, I saw files that you would normally see in a bootable drive such as the folders casper, boot, etc. and my files in it. Damn! My university stuff are in it, How could I get my files in it?

Sachin
Desconectado/a
se unió: 06/02/2012

If you created the boot-able pendrive using startup disk creator your
files will still be visible unless you have clicked erase disk.
Else you might need to use something like testdisk.

marioxcc
Desconectado/a
se unió: 08/13/2014

You have overwritten a part or the whole of your filesystem with the ISO file, so some or most files are gone. Some files may be in a part unaffected by uploading the ISO image to the flash storage, but the previous filesystem is destroyed, so you will only be able to recover some files (If any at all) with disk recovery tools. First take a backup of your flash storage, with something like "dd if=DEVICE of=~/flash_memory_backup bs=64K; chmod a-w ~/flash_memory_backup" and make a copy on which you will make the recovery effrots "cp ~/flash_memory_backup ~/flash_memory_working". Then run PhotoRec on the working copy. I think that this will recover some files, and also most files stored in the ISO image you uploaded to the flash memory. Some recovered files may be corrupt, and there's no automated way to tell for sure unless you have a list of hashes of them (Generated with "md5sum" for instance) or similar (compressed files almost always include a hash to check for corruption, the only exception I know is is the deprecated "LZMA alone format" (.lzma files)). So you must check that they have been recovered sucessfully. File names not be recovered if you use PhotoRec (remember, the filesystem is badly damaged, so there's no easy way to recover them), you will have to manually rename the files to their original filesnames if you want, and if you remember them. Don't discard your backup copy. My recommendation is to store it as long as the lost or not yet recovered information is important to you, so that you will be able to use new tools as they're developed (possibly by you) to recover more information from it. However, some files are definitely gone or at least not recoverable by software-only tools: those that used to be on the byte locations overwritten by the ISO image.

Also, don't forget to make backups!. This accident is a remainder of how important backups are. A good backup is a copy of information that isn't likely to be damaged or destroyed when the original is, and vice-versa. Just copying files within the same device or computer thus is a very bad backup.

I hope that it helps, regards.

Regards.

Sasaki
Desconectado/a
se unió: 08/11/2014

Thank you for this helpful post, it will help me too as I had the same problem, but with my external hard drive (copied an iso on /dev/sdc instead of /dev/sdb...).

I have only writen a 3Go iso on a 300Go hard drive and formatted. I'd like to know how long it could take to recover my data from this hard drive. If it is too long i will give it to a pro data recovery enterprise.