Dear all,
I have a huge problem. My laptop last week never turned back on... I had to order a new computer. I removed the hard disk to my computer to copy my old files.

Windows. See a hard disk that is not formatted at all (my old disk had linux and windows partitions)..
Linux only see the first linux partition and the rest of the space looks unpartitioned

I guess I would need a special tool to help me recover what I can
Otherwise I would need to go some special recovery services in the market but I guess these would be expensive

Alex

There ARE some tools that may help, but this is where we have to revisit the standard SYSADM reminder: "This is exactly what BACKUPS are for!". If you had good backups, you would already be recovered.

Ok, now THAT is out of the way. There are some tools that are excellent for recovery of files and folders. My first advice is to read up about "testdisk" and general partition probe and recovery. Yes, I said READ not TRY. The first step is to learn what tools are out there AND what the risk is. Even with the best tools, if the drive was part of the reason for your failure you may get nothing back. I suspect you are not that unlucky, but would advise you first to not make it worse.

Hey team: any other suggestions for Alex?

alaios,

As wpeckham has advised, do a lot of reading and research first!

To recover your data, the best method is to copy/clone the failed drive's data to another hard disk before attempting recovery. Do NOT operate on the original failed drive.

Cloning:

http://dimitar.me/clone-disk-drives-with-ubuntu/

Install Testdisk using:

In the guide “PhotoRec Step by Step” at:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

To run Photorec:


ddrescue……………Diaz's version.

http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

Using PhotoRec:
http://dottech.org/10756/testdisk-ph...will-ever-use/

sounds like the partition table

READ!!!!
read up on using FIRST

then REREAD

the documentation for testdisk

you really only get ONE shot

If you can, I'd strongly recommend making a duplicate of the hard drive before running anything like testdisk of fsck. These programs make changes to the data on the drive, and could potentially be destructive.

You say Windows didn't "see" any partitions. Did you check the Disk Management console? If Windows identifies a disk as "foreign", it has to be "imported" in order to work (see the warning above about tools making potentially destructive changes to a drive).

I think you should do some basic troubleshooting first. Does the drive spin up when power is applied? Does it make any strange noises? Is it detected by the computer BIOS? If the answers to any of those questions are "no", "yes" or "no" respectively, a professional recovery service is your best bet of getting any of your data back.

However, if the drive spins up normally and is seen by the BIOS, the next step should be to determine whether the data on the drive can be accessed at all. You should look at the partition table with fdisk -l <device> or gdisk -l <device> or parted -l <device>, and check the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive with smartctl -a <device>.

The information obtained by the above procedures should tell you enough about the current state of the drive that you can make an informed decision on how best to proceed. You should then ideally use a suitable tool (say, dd if the drive is physically OK) to make an exact duplicate of the drive to another drive or an image file, and perform any further data recovery operations on the copy rather than the original.

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Hi...

That's probably true but if what you have on your hard drive is extremely important (i.e. irreplacable,) then this might be the better option.

Regards...

alaios,

Yet more READING material for you regarding lost partitions:

http://www.geekyprojects.com/storage...-table-or-mbr/

Booting to any of the live medias can either let you try testdisk or download it live to see what you can get.


A long time ago I used to use Ranish, wish it was still being updated, you can try it.