Well, almost.

I maintain an external hard disk which has 2 partitions. One is dedicated to backups where deja-dup backs up once a day. The other is where all my TV/Films etc. go in. A few minutes back, in the excitement of updating my EEE to Fedora 19, I stupidly gave the wrong argument to dd and ended up losing my partition table (and some data in the first partition) to this HDD. Instead of of=/dev/sdc, I gave of=/dev/sdb. As it happens with everyone, I realized the minute I pressed enter. Now, I'd probably lost some data on the first partition, but I was pretty confident that my second partition still existed untouched. I can make fresh backups and get my first partition back that way, but collecting films and TV seasons from friends is a huge huge pain.

Lesson learnt: BE VERY CAREFUL WITH DD. It's safest to unplug all devices other than the one you want to write to. I generally do this. Excitement. Meh!

Now, the recovery part. I first came across this post on TLDP. I really tried to follow it, but fdisk appears to have changed. My limited knowledge about disks, such as sectors and cylinders and units and tracks sort of made it difficult to follow though. Luckily, I found testdisk in the Fedora repositories.

sudo yum install testdisk -y

I followed the steps outlined here and got my partition table back. The second partition is fully functional, as I expected it would. The first partition is still being checked. I expect to have to format it and re-backup though.

Something is better than nothing really. Saving one partition out of two isn't bad.

Lesson Learnt: Learn how to recover data via fdisk/testdisk. It comes in handy sometime or the other.

Phew. Close one.