Data Recovery from USB Drive

[wjdearborn]

During installation of F10 an extra click of the mouse at the wrong time wiped the Linux partitions on both my Hard Drive and my USB Drive. I proceeded with the installation of F10 with no further problems, but how do I recover the data from the USB Drive which previously had been formatted as FAT.

I don't believe that the drive was formatted by anaconda but I am not sure, I hit <CTL><ALT><DEL> very quickly after I realized what I had done.

F10 no longer recognizes the drive when it is connected, however Windows does recognize it and asks if I want to format it. Hence my hope is that the Partition Table was the only thing destroyed.

Google search speaks only of windows tools from repairing Partition Tables (nothing re linux tools) and a search here speaks lots about dual booting and the MBR but I can find nothing about data recovery.

Any help or direction to help would be appreciated - the USB Drive held the BACKUP of my /home directory with many many files which were not backed up elsewhere ... so I am desparate!

w j dearborn
Bill

[bob]

Some ideas may be here: http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthr...ormatted+drive

[sideways]

try running testdisk on the drive, it can often recover missing partition tables. testdisk is in the fedora repositories

yum install testdisk

[wjdearborn]

Thanks for the replies ...

I had found testdisk, shortly after the problem occurred, but it did not reveal anything.

I managed to find a Windows Version of Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery system (I had seen no sign of the Linux version until today). Only Raw Data Recovery appeared to have a chance of finding data.

This program has been running Raw Data Recovery on the 160 Gig USB drive for 10 days now, and is only about 33% complete. We appear to be finding files but it is taking forever - especially since the USB is only ver. 1.1. However, according to the Help File, I am not to interrupt or else I'll need to start all over again.

The key question at this point is: will the machine stay up for the time that is needed to work through all 312,516,706 sectors.

I will post when and if I have any results.

Bill Dearborn