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Accidentally formated external hard drive

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http://askubuntu.com – Today I was trying to copy some files from my external hard drive (1TB) to a flash drive (4GB) on Ubuntu 12.10. My flash drive contained an operating system, so I decided to format it using the disk management tool that comes with Ubuntu. Unfortunately I ended up formating my external hard drive, and it was mounted. I formated it to FAT, and in the beginning it was NTFS. An error occurred (since it was mounted) and the label on the Hard Drive vanished, but I could still copy files from and to it. In the disk management tool the partition appeared as “unknown”. When I saw the label was go (HowTos)

Danial's picture
Submitted by Danial on 11/30/2012

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Hello,

Here's the background:

I have two hard drives, one (SATA) with XP on it and another (EIDE) with an NTFS partition and Ubuntu on an ext2 (I think, or ext3, I can never remember which one's right). I also have an external hard drive (EIDE) that's completely NTFS.

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I have Ubuntu 12.04LTS as my current operating system, and I have a Windows 7 iso on a disk. I'm using an external hard drive because my internal hard drive has become damaged. I need to get Windows to install onto my external hard drive (where Ubuntu is as well). The iso disk will not install windows to the hard drive.

For a few weeks now my Ubuntu 12.04 system has been locking up. The hard drive seemed to keep locking up and going into read-only mode. I have to reboot in order to keep working on it.

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