Accidentally started writing .bin to wrong drive- cancelled operation immediately

[shaunr]

Hey guys, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this. Honestly I feel really ill after doing what I did and in total disbelief. I just need someone to point me in the right direction here. I was using ImageUSB v 1.5. So I had a 16gb image I was trying to write using the "write image to USB drive". I began the write and maybe 3 seconds go by and I realize I have the wrong drive selected. Aborted as quickly as I could but seemed I was too late and it did erase something and the drive has no letter and Windows Disk management shows all data is "unallocated space". If any one has any thoughts on what can be done to recover my data or perhaps even get things back to how they were I would appreciate the help.

Thanks!

[Oz (PassMark)]

Hey guys, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this. Honestly I feel really ill after doing what I did and in total disbelief. I just need someone to point me in the right direction here. I was using ImageUSB v 1.5. So I had a 16gb image I was trying to write using the "write image to USB drive". I began the write and maybe 3 seconds go by and I realize I have the wrong drive selected. Aborted as quickly as I could but seemed I was too late and it did erase something and the drive has no letter and Windows Disk management shows all data is "unallocated space". If any one has any thoughts on what can be done to recover my data or perhaps even get things back to how they were I would appreciate the help.

Thanks!

Oops.

Some of your data might be recoverable. But once you have overwritten data on the drive there is no way of getting it back. So it all depends on how much data was written over so to speak.

The process of writing an image to drive means you likely overwritten the partition table and the NTFS/FAT file system index. So recovering data won't be a simple task, as you will have to 'manually' use and rely on OSForensics or 3rd party data recovery tools, which are capable of scanning an unformatted or uninitialized drive for certain file types (e.g. photos or documents). It won't be easy, but there is a chance you can recover at least some of your data, chunk by chunk.

Best solution, is probably to restore the lost data from a backup.