Hi,

I recently formatted my windows hard drive and installed Ubuntu over it. Unfortunately I had some very important files that got removed. I'm looking for a way to recover those files (ntfs) from linux (which got installed over windows). I did a search on the forums and Google/linux and I couldn't find any software that will restore ntfs files from Linux.

Any help is appreciated,

Thanks

I am not sure, but I looked at Distrowatch's search option for recovery tools. There may be some tools there that will help you, I just don't know about whether or not they will work as you installed Ubuntu over it.

I'm not sure, either. But since you change the drive type, I would not place much hope in it. Hope you can, though. I know how it is to lose important files.

yeah, I'm thinking of using testdisk to solve this, I'll post my results in a bit.

yeah, it doesn't seem to work, maybe I'm using testdisk wrong

does anyone have any ideas?

You probably should create a backup image of the harddrive. You will need to find a utility that can scan the entire image for the file even though the disk is now formatted differently. And this will only work if the files were written to areas of the drive that haven't been overwritten.

You could maybe search the drive of the image of the drive for the 'magic bytes' that indicate the beginning of the file, and then try to use dd to copy that portion out and save it on another partition.

The file command uses these magic numbers to analyse what a file is based on the content of the file and not the extension. There is a text database of these magic patterns in /usr/share/file/magic