Hi, new to this program and hoping someone could help guide me a bit. I used to use a NAS enclosure to store all of my media (pictures, music, videos) but recently I decided to upgrade my desktop, which I use as kind of a server, to Win8. In doing so I decided to move my two NAS drives into the desktop to take advantage of Win8's drive pooling. I had all my stuff backed up with Crashplan but because of a mistake on my part my entire backup (about 1 TB) was purged from their servers. So, as one can imagine, I'm freaking out. Before I upgraded to Win8 I repartitioned both drives to NTFS because the NAS had them on Linux EXT partitions. I haven't written anything new to them at all. I've been researching programs to recover files and was going to buy one but found this, which I had never heard of, and figured I'd give it a shot. So far, though, I'm having no luck. I went in to options and chose "Scan for non-deleted files" per Piriform's instructions for recovering files from reformatted drives. So far I haven't found anything doing a regular scan and before I do a deep scan I wanted to find out if it's even possible to find files from a former EXT partition. Please, someone, give me some good news. It's been a rough couple of days. Thanks.
I think - although I am not sure - that when Recuva scans a formatted partition (with Scan for Non-Deleted Files checked) it somehow reads beyond the first set of system entries in the MFT and picks up the previous entries which lie beyond. Perhaps NTFS uses the MFT bitmap to recognise valid entries and Recuva just advances in 1k chunks looking for a FILE0 file signature. In any event, if you've formatted NTFS on top of Ext then this process can't be done.
A deep scan will read the partition clusters sequentially looking for a recognised file signature. If your cluster size in Ext is, or was, the same as in MTFS then you're in with a chance, maybe. There are limitations with this process. Only the first extent of a file can be found, as second and subsequent extents do not have file signatures, so fragmented files are not easily recovered. Secondly text files do not have a file sig, so txt and bat and probably others too can't be recognised as files. Also any file signature not in Recuva's list will be ignored.
So not all good news, but a deep scan seems to be the only option. I have no experience with recovering from Ext partitions, so this is all theory.
I appreciate the response. I've actually moved on to another program and their scans keep finding the files but the recovery isn't working. The ones I'm most concerned with are the personal videos of my family and my son and every time I've tried to recover one I get an error that Windows Media Player can't play the file, and VLC will play the first split second and that's it. But as I said, the program is finding them so I'm holding out hope that something will eventually work. I'll give the deep scan with Recuva a try and see if I have any more luck.
I ended up running a deep scan with recuva and it found a lot of files, but none I've recovered so far work, and they all seem to just be instances of larger video files. If there's any more advice I'd appreciate it. Otherwise, thanks for the help!
Hi Camaroon.
Have you tried something like this ...
Linux Data Recovery Ext2/Ext3 Freeware: (Eassos Data Recovery Wizard)
The EXT2 and EXT3 are the most common Linux file system. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition can easy to do free Linux data recovery for Ext2/Ext3. It can recover files not only from FAT, NTFS partitions, but also from EXT2 and EXT3 partition under Windows Operating Systems.
Whether it will have more success than the software you're now using (this may be it) I have no idea, but it's free and therefore probably worth a try.
It's free with a limitation of 1GB of recovered data. This will at least let you know if it's going to be any good, and then it's a choice as to whether it's worth purchasing a licence for the rest of your data. About $60 I think.
Welcome to the forum by the way, and sorry to learn of your mishap.