Recover Lost Data

shahdharmit · #1 26th January 2011, 03:46 PM

Hello,

By mistake I formatted an ext3 partition on my external hard-drive. Now it has turned into a vfat filesystem. Is their any chance of recovering the lost data?

Thanks

AndrewSerk · #2 26th January 2011, 04:02 PM

Hello,

You could try to recover the data with testdisk. I used it last week for the first time in a couple of years and found that they have made it "easier" to use.

Name : testdisk
Arch : x86_64
Version : 6.11
Release : 6.fc12
Size : 257 k
Repo : fedora
Summary : Tool to check and undelete partition, PhotoRec recovers lost files
URL : http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
License : GPLv2+
Description : Tool to check and undelete partition. Works with FAT12, FAT16,
: FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, BeFS, CramFS, HFS, JFS, Linux Raid, Linux
: Swap, LVM, LVM2, NSS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS
: PhotoRec is a signature based file recovery utility. It handles
: more than 100 file formats including jpg, MSOffice, OpenOffice
: documents.

shahdharmit · #3 26th January 2011, 04:04 PM

Thanks AndrewSerk. I did install testdisk. Now trying to figure out how to use it.

shahdharmit · #4 26th January 2011, 05:27 PM

I followed the following steps : -

Code:

[dharmit@penguin ~]$ sudo testdisk

Then I selected the appropriate hard-drive. In Partition Table type I selected Intel. Then I was presented with various options like Analyse, Advanced, Geometry, etc. I selected Advanced. There it lists 3 partitions that exist on the hard-drive. I selected the partition that I mistakingly formated. Then amongst the various options listed at the bottom, I selected Superblock and pressed enter. After that it carries out its process and displays a screen which leads to nowhere. But I found that it finds the name of the label before I formatted it. What shall I do now?

I've attached a screenshot of the screen that confuses me.

AndrewSerk · #5 27th January 2011, 12:28 AM

Hello,
I am not 100% sure but I believe you should let it Analyse the problem drive and see if testdisk can find the missing part. After analysing is finished you should be able to recover any data that testdisk has found from a list and copy that data to the location that the terminal was at when you ran testdisk.

This is all from memory and I believe it to be at least close to accurate. (may have missed a step between analyse and list but don't think it is necessary in the newer version)

The page in the link from the package info in post #2 has a step by step for recovery that might be worth a look.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk