Fedora 11 installer deleted important NTFS partition, created new ext3 and installed

Zach-S · 06-15-2009, 11:11 PM

Hi,

I've lost an entire partition with all my very important data on it.

I have two physical hard drives. One has Windows (80GB) and the other had my files (320GB - just on one volume, no partitioning).

I'm a Fedora fan, so downloaded the F11 Live CD and decided to install. I wanted to install it side by side with my files on the 320GB.

However I'm so accustomed to installing Fedora on new hard drives and VM's that I accidentally selected "Remove all partitions". It formatted and installed, and I used Fedora for about 10 hours total, downloading about a GB of data.

Then I realized what I had done, when I was ready to access some of the data I had on the 320GB. Booting into Windows I realized (through disk management) that the partition was gone; in fact only the /boot and main / file systems were there.

Based on the fact that I deleted the partition, formatted the disk and installed Fedora 11, would I be able to recover my data using disk recovery software? What should I use? I have good Linux and Windows experience, but I don't want to lose much data on trial and error.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Zach

syg00 · 06-15-2009, 11:38 PM

Search on "forensic" - most likely results will be photorec (does more than photos BTW) and foremost.

Get another disk, dd the whole thing over, and play there. It'll take days - and the recovered filenames are unlikely to be what you might be expecting. And they may be incomplete.
I guess I have no need to mention my sigline ...

pixellany · 06-16-2009, 12:04 AM

Only thing to add is don't do anything to write to the disk---the best thing is to run the recovery SW from another driver--or even another computer (with the problem disk temporarily installed there.. I think you can also run from live CD.

Cloning is a good idea, but be sure you are doing it correctly. Cloning done wrong WILL wipe out your data---ALL of it.

From the description, you can expect to recover **some** of the data.

(And head over to Newegg and order 1 (2 is better) external USB drives for backup.)

Zach-S · 06-16-2009, 08:50 AM

OK thanks, I'll try to use PhotoRec now, looks like it might also be able to recover some deleted files from my BlackBerry.