I was running DBAN on a laptop HDD and I had an external HDD attached. Without realising that, I ran DBAN in auto mode. Completely stupid, I know.
I noticed it was attached when the operation started, and in a panic I pulled the external out of the USB port.
Then I attached it to my other laptop, and Windows knows there's a device plugged in, and what it's called, but didn't show up in My Computer.
So I opened up disk management and added a small 8MB partition. Now it shows up in My Computer but says it needs to be formatted before use. Obviously I don't want to do that. Disk management shows the 8MB partition and 931.47GB unallocated.
It's a ~1TB Western Digital My Passport drive and had around ~250GB free before the... accident.
The drive was plugged in to the DBANning laptop for maybe 5 seconds, it hadn't even reached 1%.
I know I'm an idiot (feel free to remind me) - what, if anything, can I do, save taking it somewhere expensive?
Edit: Just to make sure no one thinks I've run off. I ran EaseUS Partition Recovery yesterday and it returned nothing, but now I'm running EaseUS Data Recovery and it's found a lot of files. It's not complete yet (about 16.5 hours left!) but I'll update then.
Answer
Accidental DBAN? That's unlucky.
The whole point of that utility is to obliterate data beyond recovery.
Fortunately you didn't let it run for long.
Your data (most of it at least) is still there, however your partition table is corrupted and needs to be repaired.
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