i have an EXTREMELY important paper that was deleted out of no where. i was doing something and a message came up saying that i have less than 1 gb of space left on my hard disk (i installed linux mint kde, but i dont like it, so i use a smaller partition with linux mint 8 on it). anyways, it asked if i wanted to delete all items in the trash(that took up like 10gb) i was stupid and did it without checking what was in it, and my paper was there. now i need to print another copy, but i dont have the file or the draft to retype. i also dont remember what the file name was, so im basically screwed. is there anyway to recover it without recovering the whole partition? and if i can only recover the whole partition, how do i do it? PLEASE HELP!

- Shut down the machine if you didn't already,
- boot a Live CD like KNOPPIX or HELIX (or use your other GNU/Linux installation as long as it doesn't alter the "victim" partitions), and
- attach storage (internal harddisk, external USB drive),
- mount it, create and format a partition if necessary, then
- make a 'dd' copy of the "victim" drive to a file on attached storage for backup purposes.
- mount the partition containing the dd image and
- one partition for recovering files to (don't use your "victim" partition),
- run Photorec, select the dd image as source and configure the destination,
- select document types to recover then let it do its magic.

Your chances of recovery roughly depend on
- file system state (clean vs dirty, corruption),
- the time that lapsed between deletion and detecting deletion (as in writes to the disk),
- the Photorec version (latest is better),
- file type to recover.

Manual pages you'll be reading before performing tasks: fdisk, dd, photorec. If you've got any questions after reading those (and preferably before executing commands) let us know.

2 members found this post helpful.

thank you SO MUCH! YOU SAVED MY LIFE!