Accidentally wrote an ISO to an encrypted 5TB drive… Help? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So, I did a thing - accidentally selected my 5TB external NTFS hard drive (encrypted with VeraCrypt) as the target for writing an ISO. The moment I noticed that "Impression" had switched the drive letter, I immediately killed the process. But yeah… damage done.

Now, the situation:

Currently shows up as:
- 6 MB FAT
- 4.3 GB
- 2 TB unallocated
- 2.6TB unallocated
The VeraCrypt volume obviously no longer mounts.
Drive was somewhat crucial - lots of structured data I’d really prefer to recover with the original file system intact.

I know chances are slim, especially with encrypted volumes, but has anyone had luck recovering from something like this? I’m open to commercial recovery tools or command-line wizardry. Would love to hear from anyone who’s been down this road.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Here this is not the case at all.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Where is “here”?

You might want to check out the member listings at https://www.datarecoveryprofessionals.org/

These organizations generally seem to hold themselves to a “better” standard than the rest of the industry.

this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025

64 points (98.5% liked)

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