Uh-oh, mkfs on wrong partition :(

So...

I was supposed to fix a classmate's computer so I was going to start formatting my usb external hard drive (it was formatted as ext3) so that I could backup all her data. Unfortunately I mounted the wrong device, sda1 (as it was a desktop, I thought the disks would be hdax so I mounted sda1 and thought it was my usb...) and run mkfs.ntfs over it without checking the data on that. After like 5 seconds running it I realized it was possible I might be doing bad stuff, so I stopped it...

After a while I realized my usb drive was recognized as sdfx on that Ubuntu live-cd and that I had run mkfs over her hard drive..
A reboot showed me what I feared: "Missing operating system".

Tomorrow I'm going to try a few fixes like running chkdsk from Windows recovery disk; as it didn't finish I have a small hope I might be able to restore it with that. Then I could try restoring data by running some "formatted partition recovery tool" by taking that disk to some other pc.

Just to let you know: check it twice before running mkfs

 

Keep us posted on this...that's a horrible feeling after realizing what you've done....don't ask me how I know

 

DON'T RUN ANY MICROSOFT TOOLS ON IT, YOU'LL ONLY MAKE IT WORSE.

The only Microsoft fix i know of, is to boot a Win98 floppy and type in fdisk /mbr, if only the boot record was overwritten this will make the disk bootable again. This rewrites the MBR and only the MBR, nothing else can be affected by this command. If it doesn't work, it's time to look into recovery software. All the data is still there, you just need to find out the right way to get it off.

 

Hey back,

good news! Apparently I have recovered all her data. It took the following process:

chkdsk: fail "Can only run on NTFS"
fdisk /mbr: fail
force mounting, mounting as other filesystems: fail "Not a valid [filesystem]"
took her disk to my friend's desktop and we run some partition restoring software: fail at first but then success!

Took an hour to generate the recovery thing from the disk. Then some more hours to backup them through my 80gb usb linked disk. The weird thing is that in her 80gb disk, I was able to recover ~350gb of data. Most of the data is redundant... I saved it anyway. Now what's left is to merge all the backups I made into the structure it had before...

Fortunately she's not pissed off at me or anything, she didn't want to make me feel bad for it from the beginning (probably cuz I intended to help) but I was feeling really bad for that anyway.

So, I know this won't end with partition lost in the world but it is never enough: check it twice before hitting enter
And check it really mounted the partition you intended to lol

 

Bravo...!