this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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Accidentally wrote an ISO to an encrypted 5TB drive… Help? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by original_reader@lemmy.zip to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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So, I did a thing - accidentally selected my 5TB external NTFS hard drive (encrypted with VeraCrypt) as the target for writing an ISO. The moment I noticed that "Impression" had switched the drive letter, I immediately killed the process. But yeah… damage done.

Now, the situation:

  • Currently shows up as:
    • 6 MB FAT
    • 4.3 GB
    • 2 TB unallocated
    • 2.6TB unallocated
  • The VeraCrypt volume obviously no longer mounts.
  • Drive was somewhat crucial - lots of structured data I’d really prefer to recover with the original file system intact.

I know chances are slim, especially with encrypted volumes, but has anyone had luck recovering from something like this? I’m open to commercial recovery tools or command-line wizardry. Would love to hear from anyone who’s been down this road.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

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[–] Majestic@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 days ago

The only thing I would note is -IF- your volumes are not partition or disk based BUT -files- based there is the possibility that corruption of the host file system of the disk the files containing the volumes are on could result in pieces of those files being marked unreadable by the disk and it’s POSSIBLE one way to solve this would be a file system check utility.

HOWEVER such activities carry a -large- risk of data loss so I would advise a bit for bit copy of the disk and doing the repair on that so if it goes wrong you’re not worse off. -IF- you cannot make a copy then I would advise at least trying to mount using backup headers before doing that and copying off anything you can salvage as file system checks can really mess up data recovery and should only be used in certain circumstances.

You’re much better off trying the recovery software I linked in fact than doing a file system check as it will tend to have better results.

You can also use the option to mount as read only in VC to prevent writes to a suspected failing disk.

Let me know if you need further advice.