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I accidentally selected my 500GB external hard drive when I tried to install Ubuntu using Unetbootin. I used it as an installer already. I haven't realized my mistake until I opened my external drive and saw my files gone and replaced with these 

abi-3.13.0-24-generic     lost+found      memtest86+_multiboot.bin
config-3.13.0-24-generic  memtest86+.bin  System.map-3.13.0-24-generic
grub                      memtest86+.elf

I already tried Testdisk and I saw my NTFS partition but not my files. I recovered it using Testdisk, rebooted, but my external drive's contents are the same even though now Testdisk says 

Current partition structure:
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors

 1 P HPFS - NTFS              0  32 33 60796 249 61  976701440 [jjp.xhd.1]

Help! Whatshoudl I do now? Are my files unrecoverable because I already used my external as an installer?

johnjullies
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  • In Testdisk you will see your files from the <Advanced> File System Utils menu. From there you can copy them to another drive. See http://askubuntu.com/questions/286181/how-do-i-recover-my-accidentally-lost-windows-partitions-after-installing-ubuntu/ – Takkat Oct 08 '15 at 19:28

1 Answers1

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The file system which used to be there is totally screwed up. However, this doesn't mean that all data is lost. Testdisk includes the program photorec (which you can launch with this command from the terminal) which uses a different approach and probably will be able to recover what's left of your data.

Note that the file names won't make any sense and that recovered data doesn't necessarily have integrity.

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