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NTFS formatted to EXT4, can't recover

Posted: 10 Apr 2014, 17:22
by canterw00t
Dear forum users,

A few hours ago I convinced a friend of mine to try Ubuntu Linux. It seems I've put him off a bit doing the following:

Before we did anything to the harddrive it had 3 partitions. An NTFS partition called recovery, one used by Windows as C:\ and one called D:\.

The Ubuntu installer formatted the D:\ partition to EXT4, which wasn't the intention since that partition contains some valuable data. As soon as I realised my mistake I quit the installer and shut down the machine. Rebooted to the live environment on the USB stick and installed and started TestDisk. I can only seem to find the lost NTFS partition on /dev/sda when I choose None as partition table type. It finds the start of the deleted NTFS partition at CHS 15911 (this could be correct, as the new EXT4 partition also starts at this CHS) and ends at CHS 30516. This is a problem, since the disk is listed as having 30401 CHS. (As you've probably guessed by now, I don't actually know what CHS means. I've just figured out that Testdisk seems to think the NTFS partition ends at a later CHS than the drive actually contains). I cannot recover this partition.

I'll be happy to post any logs. Any help would be much appreciated.

EDIT: We have found the important lost data and recovered it using other software. We no longer need to recover the partition. Thanks anyway!