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Recover drive all partitions deleted and overwritten

Posted: 04 Feb 2019, 15:34
by pwsx
Crucial_CT256M550SSD3 (MU01) 256 gb m2
lenovo t430 3820qm 16gb ram linux ubuntu gnome 16.04

Hello,
I do not have much experience, I did search and read through, I cannot come up with a situation close enough to mine to try without asking.

I mistakenly deleted a drive yesterday, reinstalled linux, and then resized the drive with gparted.

I then Realized I had done this to the wrong drive.

I believe it was previously an ext4 filesystem created with gparted. I used it to store files, and not as a bootable drive.



I ran testdisk on the drive, deeper search comes up with files that look like they belong to the new operating system, but nothing that is from what was deleted.

There is a long list of sectors that testdisk says cannot be recovered.

If you can help please do.
Thanks in advance

Re: Recover drive all partitions deleted and overwritten

Posted: 05 Feb 2019, 06:55
by cgrenier
If testdisk doesn't find your old ext4 after analyse, quick search and deeper search, you can try PhotoRec on the whole disk.
Don't forget to select ext2/3/4

Re: Recover drive all partitions deleted and overwritten

Posted: 05 Feb 2019, 13:40
by pwsx
Thank you very much for your reply.

There is only one critical file that I am looking for, the rest I can live without.

The file is an .ods spreadsheet.

I am running photorec now and will reply with results.

Thanks again

Re: Recover drive all partitions deleted and overwritten

Posted: 05 Feb 2019, 15:11
by pwsx
Hello,
Because I am searching for a file that was a .ods, I looked through the following link:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/After_Using_PhotoRec

I don't know very much but I dont think grep works for ods sheets to begin with.

Is there a way to search for .ods file contents of a word or text strings within the recovery directory?

anything I would be running would be from a terminal in ubuntu 1604.

Thanks again

Re: Recover drive all partitions deleted and overwritten

Posted: 11 Feb 2019, 17:20
by pwsx
Update:

I was not able to locate or restore the lost files. I imaged the drive and did photorec on the image, but was not successful.