EXT4 file recovery advice

Whiffle

Whiffle

Whiffle

Associate
Joined
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.
 
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?
 
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!
 
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?
 
Last edited:
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!).
 
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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