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Long story short, I unfortunately ran mkfs.exfat -L [drive-name] /dev/sd[X] and now when I plug in my WD external drive, I see an empty disk, although my drive has 4TB and is almost full.

If I understand correctly, I messed up the filesystem, but the files should/could still be there. I tried using testdisk to fix it / recover data. It detects the partition table type as EFI GPT, and finds one partition on it MS Data, but it fails to show files on it -> "No file found, filesystem may be damaged".

Is there anything I can try?

[edit] This is what I see in GParted. It does not look good that it says that the disk is 100% unused. The mkfs.exfat command should have not deleted files, and I remember that it indeed ran instantaneously, deleting 4TB of files should take some time.

enter image description here

curiousmind
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1 Answers1

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Super User isn't meant for software recommendations. But I'm making this recommendation specifically because I know this software can do the job you need it to do.

LSoft's Partition Recovery can analyze a damaged or formatted partition/disk to find potential past file systems and then can be used to potentially recover the partition, restoring access to any files that have not yet been over-written. I have personal experience accomplishing this with this tool.

That said, Pippik's suggestion to make an image of the disk and do any recovery attempts on the resulting image is a good one.

Cliff Armstrong
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