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Today I installed elementary OS over lubuntu on my laptop While asking fo the partion to choose I chose remove all data of all os by accident and after Installation I had only one partition of 156gb(that is the size of hdd). Out of that 146.7 gb was free.

All my data on that disk is lost. Is there any way of recovering that data . I only want to recover the photos that resided on my disk (may be around 3-4 gb) as I don't have any backup. Please anyone help me in recoveing my data . Thanks in advance.

shadyXV
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  • Restore a backup ... Otherwise you will need to download and recreate whatever you lost. Elementary is offtopic by the way. Restoring you hard disk might be possible with some sophisticated​ tools but success is never guaranteed. Have look at testdisk for instance. – Rinzwind Apr 05 '17 at 16:34
  • You're very unlikely to be able to recover data that was overwritten. It's a good idea to backup occasionally, especially before you do anything with partitions. – zondo Apr 05 '17 at 16:38
  • First, stop using the disk at all. Start a live session (livecd), then install photorec and run sudo photorec, select the disk to scan, the filetypes in this case images (png, jpeg, jpg,raw,gif), and the target where to save the findings which should be a different disk like a usb disk/stick. The only issue is that found files don't have the original name. – bistoco Apr 05 '17 at 17:08
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    Why is this question tagged NTFS? Also, Photorec is a file carver... That should be used as a last resort. – Andrea Lazzarotto Apr 05 '17 at 20:53

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There are a lot of tools out there that allow you to recover data from a hard drive that was either deleted by accident, or overwritten. Of course these tools are rarely 100% effective, depending on the age of the drive, and the number of passes of data that have overwritten the target data. Based on your description of the issue, it sounds like it essentially formatted your drive, and then wrote over it once, with the new OS. If that is the case, it's actually fairly easy to obtain that data again. Some tools that are available include EaseUS and Recuva. I've used the paid version EaseUS in the past to recover pictures on a drive that had been reformatted by Windows attempting to do a system recovery, and was able to succesfully pull about 90% of the pictures off of it. A lot of these offer "free" versions but usually limit the amount of data that can be recovered. You can look over this LifeWire article on free software as well and take your pick. Good luck! Perhaps next time you'll read a little more carefully before formatting a drive. ;)

Gansheim
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  • This is factually imprecise. If you recover data it is because it was NOT overwritten. "Formatting" a drive when installing a new OS doesn't overwrite the whole disk. – Andrea Lazzarotto Apr 05 '17 at 20:55
  • While using photorec how can I select connected usb for saving recovered data . – shadyXV Apr 06 '17 at 07:23
  • This article should walk you through all the steps for using PhotoRec @AndreaLazzarotto Strictly speaking you're right, "formatting" a drive technically does not overwrite the entire disk if the formated partition and OS do not take up the entire space of the disk. HOWEVER, it is possible to recover data that has been overwritten, if you have the right tools and experience. That's way certain compliance standards require secure wipes to OVERWRITE the disk multiple times, or to physically destroy it. – Gansheim Apr 06 '17 at 16:44
  • No, it's not. Those standards are worthless. There was a single paper about very old drives in the eighties I think, where they would talk about recovering single bits with a low probability of success. It was later disproved. Anyway, even if that paper was true, it takes only basic information theory concepts to see that recovering anything more than 3-4 bits is basically impossible. – Andrea Lazzarotto Apr 06 '17 at 17:00
  • Interesting, apparently I have been mislead. I'd love to talk to you about this a little more in depth. Anyway I can PM you? – Gansheim Apr 06 '17 at 17:10
  • Sure, you can find some ways here or here. – Andrea Lazzarotto Apr 06 '17 at 23:42