I had Linux installed on my laptop with 3 partitions:
[System: 100Gb Ext4 Mount Point / ]
[Data: 400Gb Ext4 Mount Point /media/Data]
[Swap: 8Gb Swap]
I needed to reinstall my system and wanted to install it over the System
partition leaving the Data
one untouched.
Unfortunately I skipped the step of partitions selection, and Ubuntu installed a brand new OS using the default partition config:
[Boot: 500Mb fat32 ]
[System: 450Gb ext4 Mount Point /]
[Swap: 8Gb Swap]
After some search, I found I can restore files by running sudo photorec
.
But I still hope to restore the whole 400Gb Data partition
as it might have been unmodified by the installation (which I interrupted quickly after, meaning not much has been written the disk since).
- Do I have a chance to get back my data partition or is it 100% sure the filesystem is deleted?
- From my understanding of filesystems, if I recover the start and end position of the former partition and create a new partition out of it, will I get everything back?
- If so, what tool should I use to do that? Testdisk?
- How is it that files can be restored, but no the directory structure? Where is the arborescence stored?
Thanks in advance
EDIT: I ran TestDisk's deep analysis on m drive, and here's what I get:
I don't understand the numbers: they don't seem to make sense (Start not before End, column not correctly aligned etc.) Anyone can help me give those numbers some sense?
EDIT2: HE FOUND IT!
It is there in the screenshot, the [Disk] partition.
Unfortunately my laptop froze (out of memory?) before I recreated the partition. Do I have to rerun the Deep Search, or can I create the partition after my reboot? I'm so excited now ...