I've completely fluffed up my drive when trying to install another distro onto one of my partitions. Even though I gave the correct drive (hdb2) it installed over my /home partition (hda2).

I have backed up but not for about a month and I could really do with trying to get some files off it. I realise that there are going to be some that are lost forever, but it was a big partition and only a small bit has been written to it - so I am hopeful of some.

Can anyone advise how to do it simply, whether there are any decent tools out there that don't cost the earth - and what my chances are

Thanks

PS: tried R-Linux but couldn't seem to get any sensible results.

Well as you suggest some of your files are probably gone forever, however, I have heard that apparently files can actually be retrieved from a hard drive even if they've been over-written many times - I'm not too sure just how true that is, but you might want to have a look at security distributions such as Knoppix-STD and the Auditor distro to see if they have any tools that might help you.

good luck, I tried to recover deleted files on a ext3 drive some month ago and had to learn that compared to ext2 (non-journaling) this is nearly impossible.
but you may try using autopsy and elocker (google is your friend)

HTH,
Flo

Thanks. I hadn't thought of Knoppix STD. Looked at it years ago and thought I'd never need/use it. Need to get familiar with some of the tools.

I am not sure how ext3 saves files, whether it fragments them, puts them all in order from the start of the position - filling space as it goes along, or (as I am hoping) spews them all over the disk but complete.

I am not overly hopeful, but there must be decent reasons for migrating to ext3 than ext2 - just hope it benefits recovery.

Thanks again.

Try it out:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

I used it recently with much success on an 80-GB NTFS partition. ext3 is listed. A surprisingly large amount of file formats are supported. Its main strength is photo files, it won't get everything, and you'll also get garbage, but it works well for many types and is an open-source tool.

The most recent version of Knoppix (5.0.1) has its sister program TestDisk version 6.3-1, but apparently not PhotoRec. The most recent version is the 6.4 release.

I had tried photorec - which did pull some files out - but they were fragmented "bits". It did pull out jpegs well! I wanted something that got me my mail and documents back.

I have made an image of the drive and can grep for certain things. Some I find and others not, but getting them off is another thing.

Most recover programs - even though they are ext2/3 specific - tend to concentrate on .doc .xls etc and not .sxw (openoffice type) docs. They are also good at finding Outlook Express mail files - but not mbox or Evolution type. Seems odd that someone would even have OE on an ext3 file system.

Try as hard as I could, I could not get foremost to work. That looked my best bet as it seems you can create file masks for it to search - which with some reading and playing I might have got there - but it would not work (this was the version in the Knoppix STD)


So, I guess my questions now are:

If I can grep certain files, how can I easily get them back?

Are there other progs that could get back mbox / evolution files?

Will my wife ever speak to me again????

I went to a presentation on pyflag at LCA in NZ. It's more designed for forensic analysis rather than recovery, but it can certainly handle M$soft mail systems, so hopefully also Linux ones.
Files can be individually selected for saving, don't know about bulk saving.

You should find it on sourceforge I would think - check it out.

I guess u need some Ext3 Recovery software

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Please do not dig up old threads and then post something like this which adds no useful information.