SOS! External HDD Erased by Patchstick Creator!

[lostspaz18]

I'm really in a bad situation right now, and any help at all would be fantastic.

I was creating a Patchstick so I could add the BOXEE interface to my Apple TV, but without my knowledge, it chose my 1TB external hard drive which had over 500GB of my movies and tv shows i've gathered through the years, instead of my 4GB thumb drive.

Now that 500GB of videos are gone, and not in the recycling bin or anywhere. Can anyone help me restore these somehow - i'm desperate!!!!!!

 

[theLimit]

Yipes! I did something similar once, all I can say is "I'm sorry for your loss". Data recovery is extremely expensive and not guaranteed to work. Someone else may know some way or tool that might help, but I had no luck back then.

 

[spice weasel]

I feel for ya. That said, let this be a lesson to all:

1) Read the directions! The atvusb-creator page explicitly states "7) WARNING Be very careful in selecting the correct USB device. Any USB mass storage devices are selectable and once you start the process, the contents are gone! A future version will have more info about the USB mass storage device selected and issue warning if the size is greater that 16GB."

2) Keep a backup of your data! If a drive fails or gets wiped for some reason (and it eventually will), you won't have to go through the time consuming process of re-encoding everything.

I'm not trying to beat up on you. We've all been there.

 

[Matek]

Yipes! I did something similar once, all I can say is "I'm sorry for your loss". Data recovery is extremely expensive and not guaranteed to work. Someone else may know some way or tool that might help, but I had no luck back then.

I wouldn't be so pessimistic. It's quite easy to restore data lost this way. Nothing has really been overwritten, it's just the partition information that's gone. What you need now is a simple data recovery tool - I can recommend GetDataBack, but it depends on your OS and the filesystem the drive used. The most important thing now is not to write anything to the external drive. The more you touch, the more data you will lose.