I accidentally installed Ubuntu to one of my data drives from Windows. The drive was a NTFS drive and contained about 80 GB of important data. The size of the drive is 110 GB. Its new file system is ext4.
In an attempt to recover the data, I downloaded foremost and tried the following commands:
foremost -i / -o /media/281C8DB01C8D7998/Recovery/ -T -v
foremost -i /dev/sda7 -o /media/281C8DB01C8D7998/Recovery/ -T -v
(sda7 is the drive in question.)
It appears that with either command, foremost gets stuck reading some file. Here is the console output:
abhi@abi-PC:/dev$ foremost -i /dev/sda7 -o /media/281C8DB01C8D7998/Recovery/ -T -v
Foremost version 1.5.7 by Jesse Kornblum, Kris Kendall, and Nick Mikus
Audit File
Foremost started at Fri Sep 28 20:58:00 2012
Invocation: foremost -i /dev/sda7 -o /media/281C8DB01C8D7998/Recovery/ -T -v
Output directory: /media/281C8DB01C8D7998/Recovery_Fri_Sep_28_20_58_00_2012
Configuration file: /etc/foremost.conf
Processing: stdin
|------------------------------------------------------------------
File: stdin
Start: Fri Sep 28 20:58:00 2012
Length: Unknown
Num Name (bs=512) Size File Offset Comment
Killed
As you can see I have to kill it from system monitor. This approach does not seem to be working. What else could I try to recover the files?
Please help. The files are very important and I will be devastated if I cannot recover them.
Edit:
Some more information:
abhi@abi-PC:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda
[sudo] password for abhi:
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x4f3e2fb9
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 206848 205004799 102398976 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 205004800 512409599 153702400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4 512411646 976771071 232179713 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 512411648 731011071 109299712 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda6 731013120 734136319 1561600 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 734138368 976771071 121316352 83 Linux
abhi@abi-PC:~$
Best Answer
Parts of this answer comes from: Is there any recovery software available for ext4?
If you formatted the hard disk drive you may wish to use Testdisk in order to recall the previous partition table and recover some data. Testdisk also allow you to recover individual files. Check it out at http://testdisk.org. Please inform if you have tried Testdisk. And take a look at previous testdisk references like those mentioned in the next links:
Best tool to recover removed files
Formatted and lost 6 years worth of photo memories.. any way to get this back?
How to recover Ubuntu partition after computer failure?
Where the answers of some other people under those questions may also be helpful for you.
Good luck!
P.S. Forensic procedures like foremost is the last step. Try first Testdisk.