Pleae help: Lion recovery erased my hd!!!!!

[zjazz]

WOOWWW!!!!! I really don't know what to do now! My external HD disappeared after I installed lion recovery disk assistant to it! I had so much back up information on it! I just can't believe this recovery erased everything I had on my HD!!!! It even changed the name of my external drive to Recovery drive! OMG!!!! I know I'm freaking out, but this was my backup external HD, and I stored all my files there to keep my MBP hd clean!!!!! HOW CAN I UNDO IT?

 

[-tWv-]

From what I gather from your post, it looks like you made your external HD a Lion recovery disk, and thus reformatted the drive and replaced everything on it.

I think what Lion recovery assistant does is that is erases the existing partition and clones your recovery partition from your mac onto a USB drive or external HD. What you should have done is created another partition on the external HD, and then used Lion recovery assistant with that partition.

I'm sorry to say, but it's going to be difficult to recover your files. You will need a utility such as Data Rescue 3 to try to get the data back.

 

[satchow]

...It says that it'll erase everything on the disk on the initial screen. Is this a joke post? I can't imagine someone would try to turn their external hdd into a recovery disk and not expect this to happen.

 

[zjazz]

no this is not a joke!
I'm now in shock!!!
I thought it will put a separate boot folder in my external HD, if I knew it's going to erase all my close to 1 tb backup data I wouldn't do it of course!!!! Now I lost all my backup and my personal data....i just need to breath a little.....

 

[Lennyvalentin]

I know I'm freaking out, but this was my backup external HD, and I stored all my files there to keep my MBP hd clean!!!!!

If your external drive was the sole storage place for your files then by definition it's NOT a backup. It's the ORIGINAL COPIES of your files.

Again, for emphasis: an external device is not a backup device if it holds the only copy of your files.

If the Lion Recovery thingy did not do a full format, but rather just wiped the sector allocation tables or similar then it might be possible to get your stuff back, depending on how forgiving the file system used by OSX is. Don't write anything to your drive, and get a good disk recovery tool, then use it to scan your external drive and restore anything it finds to a different drive.

Some data is almost assuredly wrecked, overwritten by OSX Lion OS data. This will be permanently lost, unless you send the drive to a professional data recovery firm, and that will be very expensive and they might not be able to do anything anyway.

LESSON OF THE DAY: KEEP ACTUAL BACKUPS OF YOUR IMPORTANT STUFF.

Also: learn from your mistakes so you don't repeat them.

 

[getz76]

A pretty bad user error; it tells you it is going to erase the target disk.

Unplug the disk to stop accessing it.

If the information is important, give someone like these guys a shot.

There are tools you can use to try the recovery yourself, but I would suggest against it for the non-technical types.

 

[zjazz]

If your external drive was the sole storage place for your files then by definition it's NOT a backup. It's the ORIGINAL COPIES of your files.

Again, for emphasis: an external device is not a backup device if it holds the only copy of your files.

well, on other partition of that external drive I have another backup that time machine does automatically. so no, this is not the only copy...however this one was the manual back up that i copied files to and erased from my MBP to free the space, since time machine has those as well...
im running partition recovery now and will see if i could save that partition. otherwise i will have to format it and manually move all files from time machine again to it how it was before....

 

[bozz2006]

Well that's not bad then. Just a little work that shouldn't have been necessary in the first place. It'll help to remind you to be a little more careful and read things a little more closely. Until next time.... lol. Happens to the best of us.

 

[zjazz]

Well that's not bad then. Just a little work that shouldn't have been necessary in the first place. It'll help to remind you to be a little more careful and read things a little more closely. Until next time.... lol. Happens to the best of us.

yeah, thanks, im just hoping i will be able to see or mount that partiton again....otherwise I have 2 tb HD with only 1tb available.....

 

[Jryll1]

Overwrite

yeah, thanks, im just hoping i will be able to see or mount that partiton again....otherwise I have 2 tb HD with only 1tb available.....

It is unlikely you will be able to recover your partition as data has been overwritten. If just a re-partition had taken place you would have been able to get all or most back. As it is everything that was stored in the disk areas now occupied by the recovery info is gone, or more correctly replaced with the new data.

A data recovery utility is your best bet. Not sure what a good one for the Mac is. Recover my files on Windows is a good consumer low tech savvy solution, try finding something similar.

 

[head honcho 123]

very bad user error.

good thing u had that time machine backup

 

[zjazz]

very bad user error.

good thing u had that time machine backup

yeah my bad...from now on, im gonna have not one, but two external hd. one for backup, and another for backup of backup... and i thought im safe with time machine and separately backing up everything manually to another partition!!!!