Formatted my hard drive by accident

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

So this is probably an extremely amateur mistake, but I have this external hard drive that contained all of my backed up files for the past few years. One day I decided that I wanted to try uploading Linux onto my Mac, and in doing so I opted for the usb-boot method. I uploaded Ubuntu onto that same hard drive, which was subsequently reformatted and turned into a Ubuntu OS disc. However, not only am i not able to boot linux from my usb, i also lost all of my saved files. 

I was wondering the following questions: 

  1. Is it at all possible to restore all or some of the files that i lost?

if not,

  1. I tried erasing the disk using my DIsk Utility on my mac, but though the disk shows up on the left sidebar, it won’t let me erase or partition the volume. How can I reformat the disk so i can use it as a hard drive again? 

Thanks

2

Hello,

If you format the drive perhaps using a data recovery software you could get some of your information, you can search in Google for free data recovery applications.