Hi Antoni.

The filesystem was probably formatted. USB-Creator doesn't do this by default, you have to click the "format" button.

If there is a lot of empty space on the drive now, you should be able to use file-carving software to recover a lot of the files that were there before.

Run Photorec on the drive.

hi

sorry for delay, i had trouble with automatic spam filter here, and then no notification about the reply. i appreciate your support a lot.

indeed it seems i have hit the button called "erase disc contens" (i think - i use polish version) (not "format"), since it was the only way to go on - without it, and with non-empty disk, it doesn't allow click either persistence option nor create startup disk.

anyway as far as i remember it didn't do the "full" format, just the "quick" one, merely replacing the mft data. at least it seemed so, since it was really *quick*, and the disc in question is 40gb.

i need to "un-format". just recovering the files is not enough in this case. but it seems it should be possible if there was no full format, given usb-creator doesn't format using some unique method. am i right?

thx in advance, antoni.

Hi Antoni.

What filesystem was on the drive before this happened?

hello andrew, sorry for looong delay again.
if i'm not mistaken, there was a ntfs partition (no boot, consisting of my archived files), as well as an ext* portition, containing an ubuntu installation clonezilla'ed from another disc.
thanks again
antoni