Messed up two drives when switching to Linux
A couple of weeks ago I did something I had been meaning to do for a long time, which is switching from Windows to Linux (Fedora). Burned the ISO on a USB drive and installed the OS to my NVMe SSD drive. I also have two other drives in my machine which I use to store both personal and professional data, a SATA SSD and a SATA HDD (more info can be found below). I unplugged these from the motherboard and PSU before the installation, just to be sure not to mess things up. While I did turn-off the PC, I forgot to remove the power completely.
After the installation was succesful I attached the drives and booted into Fedora. I was unable to mount either drive as their formatting became unknown, while appearing to be physically healthy. After running some checks using tools like TestDisk, DMDE, R-Studio and HDDSuperClone, I figured the filesystems were similarly damaged. So, to be safe, I cloned both drives to .img files using DMDE and detached them (having removed the power cable beforehand this time). Note that I did not perform any kind of write task to any physical drive at this point.
Scanning the .img files in DMDE shows a familiar file hierarchy, but any file I attempt to recover appears to be corrupt. RAW file recovery is definitely possible, but hardly preferably as I have thousands upon thousands of files of which many have file types not recognized by any file recovery tool.
TL;DR: Drives are physically fine but filesystem is damaged while file hierarchy is still visible in recovery software.
The drives in question:
SSD: CRUCIAL MX500 SOLID STATE DRIVE 500GB / CT500MX500SSD1
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 3TB / ST3000DM008-2DM166
Attached are some screenshots from DMDE, as well as the SMART analysis data.
My question to you is, is there any way to recover the data on these drives? It is very valuable to me. Thanks!
Posted Nov 1, 2023, 3:54 PM UTC