Understanding "Search Deeper"

[Polaczek]

Hello,

Long story short, I accidently wrote an NTFS file system over my EXT4 2TB and then I overwrote the NTFS with an EXT4 partition. I want to recover the original partition and the files in it. I am hoping to use one of the superblocks that I haven't damaged to recover the drive.

When I run testdisk, I do a search but it doesn't pop up the old EXT4. I do a deeper search and testdisk pops up with the EXT4 partition with it's correct label, therefore I am assuming it knows of the old partition. Unfortunately I cannot select this partition even if I let the whole procedure run.

I want to know:
-How does testdisk know of the old partition when a deeper search is done?
-Why can I not select the old partition when I do a deeper search and have test disk make that exact partition for me?

I copy down the information needed to recreate the partition

Code: Select all

(0 0 1 243201 80 63 3907019168 [Data])

I try to create the partition using fdisk but I not able to enter the same parameters to recreate the partition. Please offer me some insight.

[Lito]

Not long ago, another user of this forum, left this link

http://linuxexpresso.wordpress.com/2010 ... in-ubuntu/

May be it contains an answer to your problem.

Best of luck

[Fiona]

Did you format your ext4 partition through another format of ext4 file system?
In this case, you'll need datarecovery software, because you overwrote your previous file system with the new ext4 one.
Please let me know.

Fiona

[Polaczek]

I overwrote it with NTFS but aborted halfway (which I don't think matters because I still cleared the partition table)

My issue is how does testdisk still know that the EXT4 partition existed, but doesn't let me recover it.