Data recovery (MPEG)
 

One awesome day I sat down in the living room and noticed that HTPC(mythtv) was once again left in the Live TV mode....so exited from it. AFter let's say about 2mins my HDD started to keep writing sound and it lasted about 3mins. It didn't take long until I noticed that ALL of my TV-recordings were gone. Including my relative's TV-interview.

Ever since I've been trying to recover the missing mpg file. I have tried e2undel which didn't find anything, foremost which did find mpeg-files but they weren't tv-recordings and photorec which did find something and unded up filling my HDD (20GB) with video files that didn't contain the interview. The actual problem with photorec is that the HDD I'm looking missing files from is 300GB and free space that I can use for recover is 20GB. AFAIK photorec doesn't have any options to pause the process so it ends up filling my HDD while I'm sleeping :P. Also it didn't seem to have any options to limit the block range it searches.

Filesystem of my HDD is ext3 and I watched livetv for 15mins until I noticed that my recordings were gone. After that I un mounted my HDD and started looking for the file.

What would be best method to use for recovering this kind of file? The file size can be somewhere around 1-3GB but the actual data I'm looking for can't be more than 500MB.

You need lots of room to do data recovery - you need enough room to make an image of the afflicted drive. Otherwise you are faced with overwriting the data as you recover it.

However, you could try just grepping through the HDD in the hope of being able to identify the block of data it is in.

Could foremost, photorec or e2undel have damaged my partition already. I only tried to retrieve the files to the another HDD ?