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Long story short, I had 2 partitions on my hard drive. The bigger one for windows (it came installed with the laptop) and the smaller one for Ubuntu. The kernel(4.13) was acting weird after I messed up a few system files as root. So I went ahead and tried to reinstall Ubuntu (16.04 LTS). I was presented with 2 options - (1) reinstall Ubuntu on the same partition it was originally installed on and (2) delete all partitions and install Ubuntu. Honestly the sentences the installation wizard used to describe the two options was so similar I got confused and went for option 2. Now I'm sure (not so sure) that once a file system has been changed to a different kind there is no way to retrieve the data that was registered/represented by it. If there is, can somebody tell me what software I can use to recover my data?

  • I'm sure this is not a duplicate as all the "similar" questions talk about how they lost a partition with the same file-system and want to recover it. –  Feb 11 '18 at 19:57
  • Oh there are plenty of questions about people formatting a disk to ext4 when picking the wrong option during installation where they create a single OS system and wanted a dual boot. In general: no, data is gone. Sometimes you can use testdisk to restore a partition. You REALLY REALLY need to start using a backup plan next time you use a computer. – Rinzwind Feb 11 '18 at 19:59
  • EXT4 uses a different filing system than NTFS, so writing the inode blocks has probably punched holes in many of the files. However, this doesn't prevent you from trying to get something back. Small or fragmented files may have avoided getting overwritten. – ravery Feb 11 '18 at 20:01

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It may be by Testdisk

It can navigate, where the deleted files were, and copy them off.

Open your terminal and install testdisk by given below command

sudo apt-get install testdisk
sudo photorec

Thank You :)

SAMEER SENGAR
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  • Maybe I'll try photorec. I'll let you know if it worked. –  Feb 11 '18 at 20:24
  • I never needed it but a year ago one my friend had this problem and I suggested him and he said: "this was very fruitful". – SAMEER SENGAR Feb 11 '18 at 20:39
  • This answer suggests Testdisk and then goes on to explain how to launch Photorec. Without warning that the latter is a file carver and it won't be any good for recovering any directory structure. – Andrea Lazzarotto Feb 12 '18 at 13:04