I finally fell into the dd trap. I dd’d a FreeBSD Beaglebone black image to /dev/sdb, where my home directory lives. It should have been /dev/mmcblk0, but I trusted tab completion and didn’t check dmesg. After a quick check of gparted, it was obvious what had happened. I’ve nuked the partition table on the drive. Well done. The data in /home/hibby was intact, however. My home directory was still responding, I could load new files ith no corruption. A quick check of mtab tells me ~ lived at /dev/sdb6. It turns out the first ~200GB of data on the drive were taken up by an old windows install or something. So, I had to work out how best to recover that partition and that one alone. I didn’t care about the rest. Step 1: Do not turn the computer off, as it still works. …