EXT4 data recovery

micemicerabies · 06-04-2010, 08:40 AM

Last night I made the mistake of formatting my media drive. Before the format, it was ext4. then I formatted it to ext4 again because I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing(this mistake only gets made once). Now im looking for away to recover any/all of my data. The drive in question is 1tb. I have not written any new files to this drive. it is still in the same state as it was yesterday

martvefun · 06-04-2010, 09:06 AM

If your data is worth 80 bucks
http://www.stellarinfo.com/linux-data-recovery.htm

(it's the first result google gave me, if you search I'm sure you can find free alternatives)

edit : or have a look at that : 5 of the best free linux data recovery tools

huwnet · 06-05-2010, 04:06 PM

You might be able to use PhotoRec to get some stuff

mariapeter12 · 08-26-2010, 07:17 AM

Alternatively you can try the following links for Ext4 recovery

CincinnatiKid · 08-26-2010, 07:57 AM

It can be very easy as long as you haven't done a lot of writing to the disk. Here are some steps:

Make a image of your hard drive partitions with dd, example: dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/home/user/image
Make a backup of the image and then only do forensics on the image, not on your hard drive because things can change, and be overwritten etc
If you need to mount your image, mount it as read only!
Use a forensics tool on the image, such as lazarus, or text you can sometimes recover with strings. There are other tools but I can't think of them right now, start with lazarus.

You will be surprised by how much you can recover with no problems. I will be back to check on your results.

CincinnatiKid · 08-26-2010, 01:28 PM

Actually, I am not sure if Lazarus supports EXT4 or not. Give it a shot. Follow some of the other pointers that I gave though.

Try foremost also for recovery.