EXT4 file recovery advice

Whiffle

Whiffle

Whiffle

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27 Jul 2009
Posts
386
I have been a complete tw*t and have messed up an unbacked up HDD.

It is a 14TB WD Elements USB HDD, formatted to EXT4 and connected to my Openmediavault server.

I unmounted it and wanted to mount it to another Openmedivault server but I accidentally pressed initialise instead.

I managed to pull the plug after a few seconds but now nothing shows up on the drive.

Anything worth trying, to try and get some of the data back, would be much appreciated.
 
The partition might have been deleted. You could try Testdisk to recover it. But you will probably have more luck with something like R-Studio. It's not free though. Depends on how much you want the data back I guess.
 
Thanks melmac.

Am scanning the drive now with Testdisk - is pretty slow, so it is going to be at least a day before I will know badly I have ballsed things up.

Can I also try R-Studio as well?
 
Whiffle said:
Thanks melmac.

Am scanning the drive now with Testdisk - is pretty slow, so it is going to be at least a day before I will know badly I have ballsed things up.

Can I also try R-Studio as well?
Click to expand...

You will have to wait until Testdisk is finished first. Or else stop it and use R-Studio.
 
Right, TestDisk finished scanning and I have got these two windows:

IMG-20230530-162521.jpg

After.jpg

Any advice on what to do, now, would be much appreciated.
 
No problem at all.

I am actually running PhotoRec on the harddrive at the moment - seems to be taking ages at the moment (115 hours left at the moment) but it does seem to be recovering files, slowly but surely.

I am hoping that a lot can be recovered as most of the drive was untouched, when I realised I had started to screw it up.

Annoyingly, there are now file names but that is better than no files at all.

What a bleeding nightmare!
 
Whiffle said:
No problem at all.

I am actually running PhotoRec on the harddrive at the moment - seems to be taking ages at the moment (115 hours left at the moment) but it does seem to be recovering files, slowly but surely.

I am hoping that a lot can be recovered as most of the drive was untouched, when I realised I had started to screw it up.

Annoyingly, there are now file names but that is better than no files at all.

What a bleeding nightmare!
Click to expand...

After looking at your results above I don't think testdisk is going to work for you.

It's going to be a pain with the recovery from photorec.

If I was you I would consider R-Studio. It has a pretty good success rate. And outside of a professional recovery, I think it's your best bet. It costs money and I am not sure if there is a trial period or not. Which is also a pain.
 
melmac said:
After looking at your results above I don't think testdisk is going to work for you.

It's going to be a pain with the recovery from photorec.

If I was you I would consider R-Studio. It has a pretty good success rate. And outside of a professional recovery, I think it's your best bet. It costs money and I am not sure if there is a trial period or not. Which is also a pain.
Click to expand...

Thanks Soldato.

For the price (about £50.00), R-Studio is definitely worth a punt.

Do you think I should leave PhotoRec to complete or should I cancel and immediately have a go with R-Studio instead?
 
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Think rstudio has a try for free mode
Though you can't recover data
But will give you an idea if it's seeing the correct files
Before forking out 50 quid
Other free options recuva or easeus or possibly aoemi
Sadly with that size of mechanical drive
Nothing is going to be quick
If photorec looks like it's finding stuff I would let
It finish
 
Whiffle said:
Thanks Soldato.

For the price (about £50.00), R-Studio is definitely worth a punt.

Do you think I should leave PhotoRec to complete or should I cancel and immediately have a go with R-Studio instead?
Click to expand...

If it was me, I would stop the Photo Rec and go with R-Studio.

And the price might not be £50. I think it starts at that price for the most basic versions that support FAT or NTFS. You will need the full version that supports EXT4. It's a little on the expensive side. Other people might have cheaper recommendations.

Have just seen McNumpty's post. Where he said let photorec finish. Doctor's differ and all that :) Since the drive isn't actually damaged, it's not a big deal which way around you do it I guess. What I was hoping that is that the Initialise didn't delete much, if any, of the data, just removed all the partition info. If you R-Studio can restore the partition, you might not need to restore any data at all. On the other side of things, if you let photorec finish and it gets all your data back you save some money!! But the filenames is a real pain.
 
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Yeah with computers
There's often more than one way
To achieve things
So yep it's only my opinion
Doesn't necessarily mean I am right or wrong lol
There's certainly software that says it can restore partition
Rather than data recovery
Never had to try those as I am a backup fiend lol
Got backups of backups of backups
Can't have too many backups if stuffs important to you
 
Thanks guys - really helpful and much appreciated.

The R-Studio website is not the clearest.

Am I correct in thinking that this version will allow me to install on a Windows laptop but then let me plugin the USB3.0 EXT4 drive into it?

Disk Recovery Software and Hard Drive Recovery tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux

R-TT offers disk recovery software and hard drive data recovery tools. Network and RAID support.
www.r-studio.com www.r-studio.com

There seems to be a Linux version as well:

Linux Data Recovery Software. Hard Drive recovery utility

R-STUDIO for Linux Data Recovery Software supports file recovery over a network, RAID recovery, hard drive unformat and Linux recovery.
www.r-studio.com www.r-studio.com

but seems to be the OS install method, rather than the data it can recover (I think!).
 
Whiffle said:
Thanks guys - really helpful and much appreciated.

The R-Studio website is not the clearest.

Am I correct in thinking that this version will allow me to install on a Windows laptop but then let me plugin the USB3.0 EXT4 drive into it?

Disk Recovery Software and Hard Drive Recovery tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux

R-TT offers disk recovery software and hard drive data recovery tools. Network and RAID support.
www.r-studio.com www.r-studio.com

There seems to be a Linux version as well:

Linux Data Recovery Software. Hard Drive recovery utility

R-STUDIO for Linux Data Recovery Software supports file recovery over a network, RAID recovery, hard drive unformat and Linux recovery.
www.r-studio.com www.r-studio.com

but seems to be the OS install method, rather than the data it can recover (I think!).
Click to expand...

Buy R-Studio for Windows

Buy R-Studio for Windows
www.r-studio.com www.r-studio.com
Windows version for $79.99 looks to be what you need
 
I am, as usual, late to the thread but, speaking as a former technician, the very first thing you should do next time is clone the drive, then operate on the clone.
 
Thanks guys.

Really odd - just to cover my back of buying the wrong version, I dropped the company a quick e-mail just to check.

They told me that all I in fact needed was the free version

Data Recovery and File Undelete freeware for Linux files

Free Data recovery and Undelete software for Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 file systems. Unformat Linux disk.
www.r-studio.com www.r-studio.com

If I just need to deal with EXT4.

Very honest of them, but very confusing indeed!
 
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