While installing Ubuntu 11.10 (ext4) I accidentally chose a wrong partition and it overwrote my Windows 2003 installation (ntfs). How can I recover files?
So far I tried photoRec and it recovered some. Testdisk refuses to recover the entire partition, perhaps because it would have to recover a partition it is running from. Should I try making a liveCD "rescue disk" and run testdisk from there? Is there any software that could help me? Or should I install Windows again on another partition and try recovery with some Windows software?
Best Answer
Your overwritten files are lost forever from that partition. Restore them from backup.
Running Testdisk from a live CD might help a little; use the Testdisk live CD, which has a number of recovery tools. But be aware that recovery quickly gets difficult; it'll be quicker to recover your own data from backups, and to reinstall any third-party software from where you got it in the first place (and you will have to redo a clean installation of Windows itself).