I installed Ubuntu on the wrong partition, and lost a lot of important data. What can I do to recover as much of the lost data as possible? I already booted into a live USB and I have read that it is good to use Foremost, but I don't really know how to use it. So I'd be really grateful for some guidance.
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-1 on the dupe suggestion - they already installed the OS on to the partition now, if I read them right, which means the partition wasn't just deleted, it was overwritten. This makes recovery infinitely possible. – Thomas Ward Jan 05 '16 at 23:08
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That's right. Partition was overwritten, not deleted. – MAciej Jan 05 '16 at 23:11
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@MAciej this may not be a real answer, but the moment you start writing to a partition (in this case an overwrite) you introduce data overwriting into the equation, which means that some of the data (if not all) is overwritten an unrecoverable... – Thomas Ward Jan 06 '16 at 00:47
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More info here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery Was partition LInux formatted or NTFS? – oldfred Jan 06 '16 at 22:49
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To minimise the risk:
- Do not boot the system
- Use a live system and mount the device as read only
There are certain data recovering programs (list on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_recovery_software).
This software will not recover all data (because it is overwritten) and file names might be wrong. But it's better than nothing.
To prevent this happening again it is always recommended to make images of your important volumes.
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