Hi.

I've had a 500 GB usb external storage unit I was using for years, factory formatted w/ NTFS. I accidentally formatted it w/ ext3 and lost many important files. I also changed the partition type in fdisk from NTFS to Linux. I have not touched the partition since, except one time to dd a backup image to operate on a loopback device w/ tools like scalpel.

I know, I know, I should have redundant backups, I slapped myself for this.

I blame it ( though really it was strictly user error ) on consistent renaming of usb interfaces. You get used to /dev/sdb being /dev/sdb, and not /dev/sdc, and one day you forget you plugged one in after the other, and /dev/sdb is now /dev/sdc. I should've just made persistent UUID rules, but long story short I am now stuck w/ an empty 500 GB ext3 filesystem on a linux partition.

I know how to use scalpel and other backup remedies, but honestly there are many files, some not with conventional magic numbers listed in scalpel.conf, and also many files I don't want to filter through, along with files that would be broken by fragmentation loss. I would prefer if possible to restore the NTFS filesystem.

Does anyone know of what I can do to accomplish this? I tried NTFSrecovery on sysrescueCD, per searching the web for answers, but it was not able to do so. I thought about trying to change the Linux partition back to a NTFS partition to see if that would help NTFSrecovery, but I'm not super knowledgeable about filesystems and don't want to bork the situation worse.

Thank You for any and all input.

I've seen this suggested a number of times. http://www.easeus.com/

Might try testdisk to see if it can get the files off. An example maybe here. http://www.penguintutor.com/news/linux/testdisk