1

So long story short, I was told by other members on this forum that I completely wiped out windows while installing ubuntu, on my computer.

Now, I would like to retrive as many windows files/docs/photos as possible.

One of the options suggested was to use a USB to harddrive adapter.

I removed my harddrive and hooked it up to an adapter I got from Amazon.

Can someone please tell me where do I go from here? How do I use the adapter to retrive as many windows files as possible? ( I have a second laptop that has windows and Linux on it. It will be used to conduct the rescue mission )

Thank you

Appalachian Patriot
  • 11
  • you will need software to scan the drive here is a link with how to (https://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/recover-formatted-partition.htm) – wraith3690 001 Dec 02 '20 at 01:48

1 Answers1

1

The first action you should perform is to make a bit-for-bit copy of all the data. Any further processing should be done on this copy, in order to prevent further data loss.

The dd command is ideal for this:

$ dd if=/dev/sdb of=my_harddrive.img bs=1024

This will copy every bit of the harddrive /dev/sdb into the file named harddrive.img, copying 1024 bytes at a time. It will take a long time. Make sure you have plenty of disk space to save the file.

Now that you have your backup file, there are many ways to attempt data recovery. Personally, I'm a fan of PhotoRec which, despite its name, can recover much more than just photos.

$ photorec my_harddrive.img

Good luck!

Jaap Joris Vens
  • 201
  • keep in mind however this isn't a guarantee to recover your data - if Linux overwrote Windows it's impossible to know how much data you'll actually be able to recover because there's data that's been replaced on disk and won't be recoverable. – Thomas Ward Dec 03 '20 at 14:53