Overwritten Ext4 part with Windows Installation

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Nux17
Posts: 2
Joined: 27 Jul 2016, 14:06

Overwritten Ext4 part with Windows Installation

#1 Post by Nux17 »

Good evening,

I just 'misclicked' and erased my main ext4 'home' partition when reinstalling Windows.

It seems like 20% of the disk space has been used, and so the file system is now corrupted.
I tried to put it back to Ext4 but it just didn't work. Testdisk says the file system is corrupted, even if it can restore it.
How can I rebuilt the meta back? I just need to access the remaining files, and I guess some superblocks might still be there.

Thank you.

EDIT: Seems it's a old partition that moved through several disks, I can't find the backup superblocks back.
The partition has been converted to NTFS with a clean Windows install and back to Ext4 for recovery but it didn't work. I'm pretty sure that a big part of the partition is clean as it was, but I can't find a way to get a superblock and recover the dir structure with available files remaining.

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cgrenier
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Re: Overwritten Ext4 part with Windows Installation

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Try TestDisk, Advanced, Superblock.
If the location of the partition is correct, it should identify backup superblock and you will be able to use fsck.ext4 to repair the filesystem.

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