I did a really stupid thing the other night....I know this so there is no need to remind me.

I have 4 hard disks a 100 gb a 160 gb a 1tb and a 1.5 tb all labeled accordingly sda sdb sdc sdd ....well I was drinking and it's not the first time that I decided to install a new operating system, so I decide i will install to my 160gb hd since it has very little on it and nothing of importance (hence no backup) but when it came time to select where to install to I chose (through beer goggles) my 1.5 tb hd that actually shows as 1.36 there fore I was thinking its my 160 with some stuff leaving 136 gb free......so bottom line is my 1.5 tb had over 900 gb of stuff I didn't want to loose....most movies t.v shows and distros which I can live without but also all my pictures that I've taken over the past 8 years of living and traveling in China....that I don't want to loose.

I know there is some way to recover this since there is forensic computer science but it's not something I can do without help and even then I 'm not sure.....to make matters worse when installing sabayon 5.3 with ext 4 over my 1.5 tb xfs file system I chose to encrypt it and the next day when I tried to open it I remembered the password fine but must have mistyped twice when I set up the password because it didn't work.

I know I shouldn't drink and install and I promise not to do it again if any one can please help me.

Just so I understand correctly, did you encrypt the entire 1.5 TB drive?

The best shot at getting your photos back is to use a program called Photorec. It works great on any data that hasn't been overwritten, just deleted. Normally, when you install over a partition, it is just marked as free space -- the actual data is still there (well, except the new OS files which are usually in the 3-5GB range which might overwrite some of the data you care about).

Of course, all that goes to crap if you encrypted it because I believe that will write to every block on the disk (to encrypt it all). I've never tried recovering anything from an encrypted filesystem, but I imagine it doesn't work. But it doesn't hurt to try... Best thing would be for you to remember your password and then unencrypt the drive somehow.

I'd boot up a liveCD that has photorec on it and then see what happens. Note that you'll need a large drive for the recovered files (assuming you get any) because you could recover up to 1.5TB of data.

Good luck!

That sucks.

Sounds like you are in need of 'foremost' and/or 'photorec' -- a quick web-search should turn them up for you. That's a brutal job though, and you will need another drive with enough space to try to recover the stuff to. And if this works at all, you will very likely need to rename every file back to some sort of human-readable name, since the recovery tools do not tend to recover filenames, only the files themselves.

That said, there are NO guarantees with this, and since you have actually installed an encrypted OS onto the drive, there are really no guarantees!

I have only experience recovering files on Ext filesystems, and zero experience with XFS. Check here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=748497 for maybe a couple more links; that's the page that leads me to believe that the tools mentioned will work on XFS.

I wish you the best, but take no responsibility for how you proceed or for the results you get, if any -- but one thing -- do NOT use that drive any more, for anything, until you try to recover the files.

Sasha

Thanks I will try photorec, and ya I did encrypt the entire thing and I do remember the password as I have used it before but I must have mistyped it twice and therefore the password I remember correctly doesn't work.

Any other suggestions would be great.

Thanks again

Thanks Sasha.....I have my 1tb free so I have the space to recover the data and My pics might be at most 100 gb the rest I don't care about but I'll try what you and pljvaldez said.......and believe me I wont be booting that system or using that disk at all till I hopefully get my pics back.........

People if your listening never never never drink and install an operating system as easy as it is to install and if ya do don't encrypt it...lol...

thanks again.

It's a tiny consolation I know, but, you aren't alone: if you look around you'll find any number of other threads where other people have done similar things to their computers under the influence. It's very unfortunate that you happened to just have such a big drive, and opt for encryption.

Very best of luck -- let us know how it goes.

Sasha

Thanks for the support, I have been reading up a little on foremost and photorec but will not be trying them tonight as I have been drinking a little..lol...I just hope this works or my wife is gonna kill me.....hopefully you'll hear from me again...it's 1:36 am here in China now so i'm off to bed....thanks again people.

before trying anything, boot a Linux livecd, and duplicate the disk to another one using the dd command.

Then do you experiments on the duplicate disk. If you mess up the disk, you can always duplicate the original disk again.

Good luck, and easy on Jiu 酒

I agree with GrapefruiTgirl, try the two programs, but don't expect a miracle, after overwriting part of the data on there, and the encrypting the entire drive, chances are very low that you will get anything. You must decrypt the drive before trying this tho.