Data recovery for Windows on Linux
 

Is there a program for Data recovery for Windows on Linux?

Have installed dual boot with Linux Mint I had first Windows 7 but could not dual boot ran Gparted to find out if I could make space this failed as I had a dark screen. Then found the Windows 7 would not load and wanted the installation disc which I did not have. So I installed Windows 10 and Linux Mint 19.1

I then found Windows had to little space even though I had used disk management and thought it had allotted 110 Gb to Windows and 110 Gb to linux. Guess I have that wrong as Windows has only 20GB space

I am having difficulty recovering the files from the Windows 7 and using Recuva but not having any success. Can't seem to copy the files onto a USB

Did you install windows 10 to a separate partition? Or did you install it over windows7? What happens when you try to copy files to the usb? Any error or warning messages?

Photorec (https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec) works very well - i have used it several times to recover both data and photos.

I'm not quite sure it will work on Windows (FAT or especially NTFS) partitions.

I have used it on a windows laptop hard drive but it has been some time - can't remember the FS type. Just checked docs, it works on quite a few FS types, including FAT and NTFS.

Thanks for that worked but I am not sure it actually got the missing files certainly got loads of files. Unfortunately all the .doc files had just garbage.

I have now using gparted quick formatted as NTFS loaded Windows 10 and Linux Mint 19.1 without changing the suggested partitioning added Office 2019 to the Windows.

I will then do another photorec and see if I can get better results. Always hopeful and good practice.

By the way last Sunday someone asked me if I could un-encrypt his Windows files. He had a ransomware attack asking for loads of Bitcoins to get his files back. Poor chap had not made backups for 3 months.

Told him to install Linux Mint 19.1 as dual boot then he could wait for Interpols un-encryption key.

So really the question is about data recovery form Windows filesystems.

I believe Linux has sketchy support for NTFS data recovery.

It most definitely will.
Problem is, it's very low level and should be a last resort.

There's just a few general rules for data recovery regardless of filesystem:
Stop using the disk immediately!!! everything you do from now on should happen from an operating system that does NOT operate on the same disk.
Preferably make a full clone of the disk (with dd) and work on that only.
Trust me, last time I had to do data recovery - in retrospect I wish I'd done it that way.

Photorec certainly works on NTFS - it only looks for file "signatures", so the filesystem is largely irrelevant. As for your doc files, they will be compressed - hence the "garbage" unless you use a program that knows the formatting. Libreoffice should I would think, but I rarely bother to recover anything other than photos and maybe the odd txt. If the files are (very) large they may be segmented and thus much harder to recover.

Oh thanks for that so the docs are compressed they appear as garbage in Libreoffice also in Office 2019.

Any ideas how to uncompress them?

The compression is done by office - if it can't read them, the files are likely trashed. Re-installs are about the worst thing to do during recovery -see the comments in post #7.