Can I recover a whole deleted hard drive?
LINUX based utility for use with gnuddrescue to aid with data recovery
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Hello,
by accident i deleted a complete external hard drive. Didn't write any other data on it since then. Can I use gnuddrescue for recovering the data?
In a word, NO. Gnuddrescue is basically only a cloning tool that does a very good job at processing physical hard drive errors, and my ddrutility software only compliments that. It is designed for recovery of failing hard drives. In your case there is nothing physically wrong with your drive. All it would do for you is clone your deleted drive as another deleted drive. The only thing it could do for you is make a copy to work with so as to preserve the original if desired, so that if a tool you run on it makes it worse, you can make another copy and try again.
Depending on how you deleted the drive (reformated?) and how much damage is done, you would need a different kind of tool, such as testdisk. Testdisk has both Linux and Windows versions, and also comes with photorec. Testdisk has the ability to find and recover deleted partitions. And photorec will scan the whole disk for any possible files. There are other free tools also such as recuva (Windows only), plus paid software such as R-Studio. Do a search for how to recover a deleted drive to find more tools.
Good luck with your data recovery.