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I overwrote a Lubuntu installation on my laptop hdd when I installed Xubuntu. I choose the wipe the disk before intalling Xubuntu... although I had a lot of pictures on the lubuntu installation that I wish to keep... after finding out about tstdisk and photorec. I installed gparted on a usb thumb drive.

I run photorec after booting my laptop with the gparted thumbdrive... and it seems to find a lot of .jpg and .png files, which are what I am looking for.

Although during the process photorec asks me where to store the recovered files...

I choose to store the recovered files in /usr/games ...and when the files have been recovered, I can indeed see them in that directory.

I thought it would be a simple case of then plugging the usb thumbdrive (with the gparted installation on it) into another laptop and then navigating to the dir (/usr/games) to then store the files permanently on another machine...

Although my problem is that I can't seem to find the /usr/games directory when I am viewing the file structure of the thumbdrive on another machine...

I would greatly appreciate any advice on how this is done... how can I restore the recovered files to a more permanent destination... how to do I transfer the recovered files from the live gparted running instance?

Thanks very much for any help.

Chris Andrew
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    The live installer is in memory only unless you also use persistence. But you really should be writing to another drive as you may need a lot of space. And then use that drive for your normal backups, so you do not have to use testdisk or photorec again. – oldfred Aug 20 '22 at 17:44
  • Thank you. I'm not in need of a whole lot of space. The files that I wish to recover probably amount to about 8GB... I have been reading a little about having a bootable USB that has some separate partitions. So I can boot of the partition that has the OS (gparted) and then recover the files to separate "storage" partition... I have a 32GB USB drive... so this should be enough room... I am just wondering what can of partitions should I create FAT32 or EXT or other... thanks for your response. – Chris Andrew Aug 20 '22 at 17:50
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    FAT32 only can have files up to 4GB and has no journal for recovery. It is ok for small partitions that often are not updated like an ESP for UEFI boot. NTFS gives use with Windows but does not support Linux ownership & permissions. If only data like photos & you copy back into ext4 partition you can reset ownership & permissions to typical data defaults. But system files have various ownerships & permissions, so no Linux system files should be copied to Windows formats. If only Linux use ext4. – oldfred Aug 20 '22 at 18:57
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    Pros & cons of persistence install over direct install to flashdrives - C.S.Cameron https://askubuntu.com/questions/1217832/how-to-create-a-full-install-of-ubuntu-20-04-to-usb-device-step-by-step Some tools that create USB flash drives, create a hybrid DVD/flash drive. That has no partition table, so difficult to use additional space. – oldfred Aug 20 '22 at 19:00
  • Thanks for the replies oldfred. I ended up getting somewhere with... what I did was to reformat the usb thumb drive... then partitioned it using Windows Disk Management... two separate partitions using FAT32. I used one for re-creating the live gparted iso... and then was able to copy the restored files over to the other partition on the thumb drive. Although, photorec was didn't restore any the files I was initially after... so a bitter sweet result... thanks for help all the same though – Chris Andrew Aug 20 '22 at 22:26

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