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I'm so new to Ubuntu, I just started playing with it 19 hours ago. I'm really not 100% sure what I'm doing, so please excuse the mistakes in terminology and general processes.

As I was attempting to make my Samsung 740U3M able to dual boot, I had no extra USB drives except my external hard drive. I used etcher to put the ISO on the drive, but the website said it wouldn't delete everything.

It did delete everything when I put the ISO on there.

So, I powered down the machine and bought a second 32GB USB drive to install from. I now have the latest Ubuntu and updates installed on the internal HDD.

Is there any way to save the stuff from my external hard drive? I haven't used it, so I don't believe it's been overwritten. Please help!? I'm an undergrad and all of my work was on there!

EDIT It's not a duplicate of that question because he was trying to make an image of his HDD, whereas I was trying to put the ISO "next to" my files on my external HDD. Etcher "flashed" my HDD when it put the ISO on the HDD. I'm currently running a quick search in TestDisk. Instructions called for me to check the "Intel" option for the search.

Zanna
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Hunter Murphy
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    Was drive newer gpt or old BIOS. gpt has a backup partition table at end of drive where MBR is only at beginning of drive which you overwrote. Did you have multiple partitions or one large one? If one, then you probably need photorec or NTFS specific tools to scan drive. – oldfred Mar 30 '18 at 03:30
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    The drive is a WD EasyStore 2TB. I bought it brand new from Best buy last June. I did use it to store back-ups of my windows 10, but I'm unsure exactly if it had multiple partitions. – Hunter Murphy Mar 30 '18 at 03:53
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    Update: TestDisk was not obviously successful. Am now running PhotoRec, which seems to be working perfectly. I can view the recovered files before process is finished and it is definitely working. Currently, it has recovered 490 files, with an estimated time of completion in 16h 45m, and dropping a minute every 5 seconds. – Hunter Murphy Mar 30 '18 at 11:36

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First things first: DO NOT write anything to your external hard drive. Any extra data written decreases the chance of recovery.

What I would suggest is this:

Use dd to image your external drive to a different one. That way, you can play around with various recovery software without worrying about it - if you corrupt that 2nd drive you can simply re-image it

You can search online for various NTFS recovery software. As the Ubuntu ISO would have only overwritten the first 1.5GB or so, you still have a chance of getting a decent amount of data back.

But, remember for the future to ALWAYS make backups. How often should you backup? Well, that depends on how much data you can afford to lose.

You'reAGitForNotUsingGit
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