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![[F]](/Images/i7/site.gif) TidBITS  TidBITS TidBITS Talk
Recovery from Disk Utility Erase![[larry469]](/webx/?30@@1) larry469 - 07:25am Dec 18, 2007 PSTSaturday night I was formatting some spare external drives. In a moment of total brain cramp I accidentally said "yes" to formatting my 500gb live storage drive! The drive I was formatting failed so I clicked to try again and didn't notice that the "bad" drive was no longer the one selected, my live drive was! I have not written anything to the disk since the errant erase. Is there something than just rebuild the old directory and show my files again? It would seem logical to me to expect some kind of "undo" tool to be available regardless of what the warning dialog says. Other "magical" things are done. I ran Data Rescue II for almost 24 hours. When the time to completion started going back up, it was reporting another 72 hours, I bailed. Does anyone have any magic pixie dust for me? Before anyone gives me the "that's what back ups are for". I do have back ups but the data on this drive was stuff I had moved from the other drives I was format and/or moving from the main drive to leave room for video processing. So for a few hours I was without a net and I fell. I sent this suggestion to Apple but who knows if it will be acted upon and it is, in my situation, "locking the barn door after the horse is out". I'm sure I'm not the only person who has made this mistake. But it's one that could be blocked by a patch to the Disk Utility package. What if all drives were "protected" by default? Have a check box that must be unchecked before letting a format/erase/partition proceed. Not just a warning dialog. If the box is checked then the buttons would not work. That way doing a format/erase/partition would require unchecking a box & agreeing to a dialog. While not totally idiot proof it would make it harder to make my mistake. There could also be an "advanced user" function that removes the checks by default instead of manually one at a time.
Kirk McElhearn (apparently)
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Dec 20, 2007 5:22 am
(#1 Total: 5)
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Re: Reovery from Disk Utility Erase
On Dec 18, 2007, at 3:25 PM, larry469 wrote:
> Saturday night I was formatting some spare external drives. In a
> moment of total brain cramp I accidentally said "yes" to formatting
> my 500gb live storage drive! The drive I was formatting failed so I
> clicked to try again and didn't notice that the "bad" drive was no
> longer the one selected, my live drive was!
>
> I have not written anything to the disk since the errant erase. Is
> there something than just rebuild the old directory and show my
> files again? It would seem logical to me to expect some kind of
> "undo" tool to be available regardless of what the warning dialog
> says. Other "magical" things are done.
>
> I ran Data Rescue II for almost 24 hours. When the time to
> completion started going back up, it was reporting another 72 hours,
> I bailed.
>
> Does anyone have any magic pixie dust for me?
Disk Warrior _might_ be able to do it, but I'm not sure how it works
on volumes that were erased. Data Rescue takes a very long time, but
it can work.
Contact DW technical support and ask if their program can fix it;
they'll give you a good idea.
Kirk
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r2g (apparently)
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Dec 20, 2007 5:27 am
(#2 Total: 5)
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Re: Reovery from Disk Utility Erase
> Initial Message
> Posted by: larry469 Date: Dec 18, 2007.
>
> Saturday night I was formatting some spare external drives. In a
> moment of total brain cramp I accidentally said "yes" to formatting
> my 500gb live storage drive! The drive I was formatting failed so I
> clicked to try again and didn't notice that the "bad" drive was no
> longer the one selected, my live drive was!
>
I have done a similar thing to an iBook G3 that wasn't mine & wasn't
backed-up, and I thought I was erasing an external drive in all the
back-and-forth, and yet Data Rescue at the time did rescue me. I'm
not sure what version it was (DataRescueX?), this must have been at
least a couple of years back -- I used the DataRescue trial version
to see if there was something to retrieve before I bought it -- it
worked pretty quickly in that case.
Sorry I can't be of help, but I felt then exactly like you -- why no
"undo" ? But maybe this happens to too few users for them to bother.
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dr (apparently)
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Jan 1, 2008 9:22 am
(#3 Total: 5)
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Re: Reovery from Disk Utility Erase
larry469 wrote:
> Saturday night I was formatting some spare external drives. In a
> moment of total brain cramp I accidentally said "yes" to formatting
> my 500gb live storage drive! The drive I was formatting failed so I
> clicked to try again and didn't notice that the "bad" drive was no
> longer the one selected, my live drive was!
>
> I have not written anything to the disk since the errant erase. Is
> there something than just rebuild the old directory and show my files
> again? It would seem logical to me to expect some kind of "undo" tool
> to be available regardless of what the warning dialog says. Other
> "magical" things are done.
>
> I ran Data Rescue II for almost 24 hours. When the time to completion
> started going back up, it was reporting another 72 hours, I bailed.
>
> Does anyone have any magic pixie dust for me?
This will likely meet with some ridicule on this list but if it will mount on OS 9 then the old Norton package might work for you. It had a feature that would scan a disk looking for directory blocks and then looking for the files said directory blocks pointed at. After it built a list with confidence values for each file you could sort the list, select various files, and it would copy them as best it could to another volume. All without changing any bits on the "bad" volume.
I used it about 1/2 dozen times over the years to get back files wiped by bad hardware or operator error.
David Ross
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cdevers (apparently)
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Jan 1, 2008 9:35 am
(#4 Total: 5)
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Re: Recovery from Disk Utility Erase
On Tue, 18 Dec 2007, larry469 wrote:
> I ran Data Rescue II for almost 24 hours. When the time to completion
> started going back up, it was reporting another 72 hours, I bailed.
I've successfully used DRII in almost the exact same scenario, save that
it was with an 80gb drive, rather than 500gb. It worked, but I think it
had to run overnight (at least), if not a couple of days or so.
The frustrating bit is that the filename data typically isn't
recoverable, just the file contents. You end up with thousands of
JPG00001.JPG, JPG00002.JPG, ... JPG89468.JPG, JPG89469.JPG items, most
of which you don't care about (clip art, web page caches, etc).
But provided that the drive was mechanically healthy, and that nothing
else had been done to it since the erase, this ought to work.
(Disk Warrior is worth a shot to, but my hunch is that it isn't going to
work in this scenario -- it'll see an intact directory that happens not
to have anything in it by default, but the "Scavenge" option might be
able to do a bit better...)
--
Chris Devers
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bart.hanson
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Jan 15, 2008 7:01 am
(#5 Total: 5)
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Re: Recovery from Disk Utility Erase
I did exactly that to a staff member's drive where I work! Duh, Duh, Duh!
Data Rescue eventually identified all of the files on the Disk which I then copied to another connected Drive. I didn't bother with the System or Applications just the entire User Home folder. I later replaced the fresh empty User Home folder of a newly installed System, fixed some small issues, repaired the privileges and all has been good since (over two years ago).
Good things take time. In my opinion Disk Warrior is a godsend for directory issues such as cross-linked files but not necessarily for Data recovery.
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TidBITS TidBITS TidBITS Talk Recovery from Disk Utility Erase
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