usb hard disk formated by accident - howto recover the files
 

Dear all,

I am running fedora core 6 on a Thinkpad R52 (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:R52) with the kernel version 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6

I was reinstalling my fedora core 6. In the early stages of the installation, I was asked what hard disk drive to use and which settings to apply. I chose to remove every previous partition and reformat everything (the default if you want a fresh start), as I thought that my only hdd recognized by the installation would be the one built into my laptop. But I was wrong, I forgot to unplug my usb hdd during installation and it got formatted (ext3) too, as well as being used to store the new fedora core 6.

Now I am wondering whether the is a good program to recover all/parts of my files, actually if that is possible in the first place.

Please help me, all my files would be gone if not.

Charles.

If it installed FC6 to that drive, you'll be hard pressed to recover much (if anything). Anywhere that the installer wrote to is essentially completely gone. (At least, without a VERY expensive recovery process). I'd look at many of the tools on the FIRE LiveCD for data recovery on this drive. (I.e., testdisk, grave robber, etc.)

In all likelihood the files are gone. The levels of destruction go from just repartitioning (leaves most of the former data intact), then formatting (that randomly bulldozes over the data structures that made up the previous file system), and then actually writing data to it (where the formatting changed blocks sparsely just to establish the new file system structure, now you are actually using a lot more disk blocks). Seems you have done the latter... sorry. That said, and since I believe your current usb disk's data are not so valuable now, you can try to put the original partition map (was probably the whole disk) back and aggressively run fsck. It's worth a try, but don't get your hopes up too high.

Good luck. mlp

thanks for the replies, I will give running the recovery live cds a shot and tell you what happens.

Charles.