
Story
I wiped my Windows server (NTFS) with Linux (and lazily told Linux to claim all disk space) and lost some extremely important files which I now need to recover - the disk size is 140GB.
Here are the steps I took
1- Use latest Ubuntu live cd and install testdisk, photorec
2- Use testdisk instructions here TestDisk step by step
3- Changed the partition type from Linux LVM to NTFS
4- TestDisk gave an error "Filesystem seems damaged"
5- Run PhotoRec, using instruction here in post #6 by Fiona Filesystem seems damaged
6- PhotoRec has been running for 40+ hours now
Problems I have
1- The files I need to recover are 7+ GB in size, but so far the files recovered are on average under 10mb
2- PhotoRec sometimes seems to create large files (10+GB) but these files disappear?
3- PhotoRec is on pass 0 and for the last 10 hours has been cycling over sectors - it gets to for example sector 280,000,000 and after a brief pause resets to 200,000,000 every 30 mins or so
I have now created a disk image using TestDisk but left the scan running on the main drive.
Can someone please help answer my questions. Is there a better way to recover my data? Did I do any steps wrong?
Thank you
