Hi all,

I just did something very dumb and would dearly love it if there is a way to recover. Without going into the whys and wherefores of my stupidity, here's what I did: I'm using Linux MINT by the way.

1. using Gnome disks, I removed the single 4 TB NTFS partition on an external 4TB USB hard drive (/dev/sde1) which contains all my data
2. I then recreated a partition on this device, this time as a "internal Linux disk" I think it said - and password protected - hence encrypted.

I did not format in step 2, (and the creation of the partition was very quick) so I'm hoping the data is still lurking and can be recovered. This is a very serious disaster so any help would be really appreciated. I'm just fearing that creating an encrypted partition in step 2 has made recovery more challenging.

Thanks, James

There are utilities such as TestDisk or Gparted which can be used to recover lost partitions.

With the external disk plugged in, run this from a terminal and post (all) the output.

Hi. Here it is and thanks. By the way, I did the same thing on /dev/sdc which is also 4 TB. It contains exactly the same data as /dev/sde - the only difference is that it started out as an 3.5 TB ext4 non-encrypted partition (+ a 0.5 TB NTFS partition which I don't care about).

NAME FSTYPE LABEL UUID MOUNTPOINT
loop0 squashf /snap/core/
loop1 squashf /snap/core/
sda
├─sda1 ext4 5140e198-a800-454a-a4b7-b9a4f2e79777 /
├─sda2
├─sda5 swap 6dc90baa-483b-4563-9425-067ad0941f7e [SWAP]
└─sda6 ext4 b5b07473-a37c-4da9-9426-d725dbdc398f /home
sdb
├─sdb1 ntfs PQSERVICE 44B80F20B80F0FDA
├─sdb2 ntfs SYSTEM RESERVED 8CA2100BA20FF90A
├─sdb3 ntfs Packard Bell A06A12086A11DC3A
├─sdb4
└─sdb5 ntfs Data partition 10589EA2589E85DE
sdc
└─sdc1 crypto_ 27154657-a731-43b6-b924-b52e28694ac9
└─NAS ext4 NAS 120be2b5-a03f-4c95-af3f-36fc95e0b395 /mnt/NAS
sde
└─sde1 crypto_ 05865cc8-7f76-4944-a5c7-26f167abbe3b
└─luks-05865cc8-7f76-4944-a5c7-26f167abbe3b
ext4 NAS 45bb6959-b2da-46f5-8b1a-2e0fef93adac /media/mayb
sr0