shred /dev/sdb a complete disaster - need help

For some ridiculous reason, I did ‘shred -n1 -z -v /dev/sdb’ instead of sdc. I CTRL+C (SIGINT) it after 16MiB had been written. Now the partition table is gone, and I can’t mount the drive. It is 500GB, and nearly 50% full of movies that are important to me.

What should I do? Also, before the annihilation of my data, I noticed ONE directory in particular missing … the Movies directory. The others were present. If I restore the parition again, how do I recover that lost (deleted?) directory?

TIA
felipe

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There are companies that may be able to help with this recovery, but if
you get your partition table rewritten you’ll likely only have lost one
movie, or the first little bit of one. Depending on where your
directories/files are listed you may need to fix those too, but there are
companies for that. This is a good reason to have a backup since the
occasional screw up with ‘shred’ isn’t as common as the hard drive just
going bad.

Other notes I"m sure you’ve learned… don’t run as ‘root’ unless you’re
really sure the command is right. Most of us at some point realize that
with ‘rm -rf’ but shred is just as effective, if not a bit moreso.

Good luck.

felipe1982 wrote:
> For some ridiculous reason, I did ‘shred -n1 -z -v /dev/sdb’ instead of
> sdc. I CTRL+C (SIGINT) it after 16MiB had been written. Now the
> partition table is gone, and I can’t mount the drive. It is 500GB, and
> nearly 50% full of movies that are important to me.
>
> What should I do? Also, before the annihilation of my data, I noticed
> ONE directory in particular missing … the Movies directory. The
> others were present. If I restore the parition again, how do I recover
> that lost (deleted?) directory?
>
>
> TIA
> felipe
>
>
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felipe1982 wrote:
> For some ridiculous reason, I did ‘shred -n1 -z -v /dev/sdb’ instead of
> sdc. I CTRL+C (SIGINT) it after 16MiB had been written. Now the
> partition table is gone, and I can’t mount the drive.

gpart “Tool That Can Guess a Lost Partition Table” (not “gparted”)
Also note that the partition table for a single partition/file system
disk is rather trivial and can be trivially recreated manually. Just
don’t create any file systems.
As for the part of the file system overwritten, you may need to
-b superblock Use alternative superblock
when running fsck.ext{2|3} or
sb=n Instead of block 1, use block n as superblock.
when running “mount -t ext{2|3} …” due to the superblock being
shredded.

Kind regards,
Andreas Stieger

felipe1982 wrote:
> For some ridiculous reason, I did ‘shred -n1 -z -v /dev/sdb’ instead of
> sdc. I CTRL+C (SIGINT) it after 16MiB had been written. Now the
> partition table is gone, and I can’t mount the drive.

gpart “Tool That Can Guess a Lost Partition Table” (not “gparted”)
Also note that the partition table for a single partition/file system
disk is rather trivial and can be recreated manually. Just don’t create
any file systems.
As for the part of the file system overwritten, you may need to
-b superblock Use alternative superblock
when running fsck.ext{2|3} or
sb=n Instead of block 1, use block n as superblock.
when running “mount -t ext{2|3} …” due to the superblock being
shredded.

Kind regards,
Andreas Stieger