Filesystems, Disks and Memory

Hi!
Installing the debian wheezy by netinstall my external USB-HD (2TB) is erroneously completly formated as swap-filesystem. I was to lazy to disconnect the USB-HD, so now i could kick myself .
Is there any chance to rescue the data. I tried to find a way by using
gparted: the whole HD is swap-fs. I only check with gparted, i didn't do any format-action.
and
testdisk. analyze and deeper search

both only see swap-fs and testdisk cant find anything.
I need a helping hint, because i need urgently some of the primary stored backup-data.

thanks in advance
IMPe

I'm afraid you're out of luck:
1) If set up as a swap device, chances are it has been used during install, so data, or, even worse, structural data, have been overwritten.
2) Should some of your old data blocks still reside on disk, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to put them back to your original files in correct order, esp. as they may well be binary / compressed data.

Thanks RudiC for giving me certainty!

IMPe

You might be able to use magicrescue or photorec to recover scattered files from it, but this will be patchy at best and useless at worst for the reasons Rudic gave. These tools just look at raw blocks for recognizable jpeg headers and the like -- they cannot recover fragmented or unidentifiable files.