ok, I used to have a normal FreeBSD installation on a hard drive. I used stored many photos on this hard drive. The filesystem was ext3... or whatever FreeBSD uses.

Anyway, I accidentally installed Windows XP, using quick format, onto this hard drive. This was a mistake and I stopped using the hard drive right away... so now it just has the XP files on it.


I am trying to get the old FreeBSD files back... the photos and stuff...


How can I do this? The hard drive is connected via IDE cable to a PC.... I can boot to another XP installation... or boot to a live cd.

Any ideas?

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/252267-45-recovery-data-hard-disk-deleting-partition

That one seems to have a similar problem and had some success with recuva (Allthough i don't know if it will work with ext3.

easeus however might do the trick: http://www.easeus.com/download.htm it supports ext3.

Both work from Windows.

The good news is that a quick format does almost no damage to old filesystems, so most or all of your data is sitting untouched on the drive. Many recovery tools will be able to patch things back together. I also recommend using this as a moment to configure a good backup solution.

How did you accidentally install Windows XP?

I think he meant to install XP (but why in satan's unholy name would you want to?) just onto the wrong partition... easy mistake to make tbh, I've done it myself a couple of times over the years...

^ ^ ^
You'd probably install XP to run older games and stuff, plus you can really fine tune the sucker's memory footprint, enabling it to run on ancient systems.

@OP: by hard drive, do you mean the whole disk drive, or just a partition? A normal FreeBSD install would probably use multiple partitions, with the boot and system partitions on the beginning of the drive (like your XP system partition). So if that's the case, you could have your FreeBSD data partition basically intact, and you'd get your partition back by repairing the partition descriptor table. Maybe you need to plug the disk into a running FreeBSD system, then use some tool to do that?

It was an accident because there was two hard drives on the machine. One was 30 GB and the other was 250 GB (the one I am trying to recover) and in the installer, their byte count looked similar (stupid windows developers, Thank You,) and I selected the wrong hard drive.


THAT is how you accidentally install XP. At the time I was installing XP on like 3 machines per day anyway... that's like 30 installations every 80 hours... I was an IT assistant.


I still have to try the methods advised here.


Sorry for digging up this thread... but I've had like 10 people ask me "How do you accidentally install XP".

@Don: Yes the PC had 2 physical hard drives and I installed XP on the wrong one... it had FreeBSD on it.

Thanks ~~~ no more help needed for now.

http://www.tomshardw...eting-partition

That one seems to have a similar problem and had some success with recuva (Allthough i don't know if it will work with ext3.

easeus however might do the trick: http://www.easeus.com/download.htm it supports ext3.

Both work from Windows.

recuva - only recovers windows files
easeus - to recover ext3 files, I need to buy the Professional one to get more then 1 GB files back from my lost EXT3 partition....


soo... I guess has anyone ever had the same issue?

Huh? You know that the root filesystem is backed up in more than one location on the drive, right? There are plenty open source programs that can find and restore an ext3 filesystem because of that.

[quote name='SimonForsman' timestamp='1327463273' post='4905993'] http://www.tomshardw...eting-partition That one seems to have a similar problem and had some success with recuva (Allthough i don't know if it will work with ext3. easeus however might do the trick: http://www.easeus.com/download.htm it supports ext3. Both work from Windows.

recuva - only recovers windows files easeus - to recover ext3 files, I need to buy the Professional one to get more then 1 GB files back from my lost EXT3 partition.... soo... I guess has anyone ever had the same issue? [/quote]
Yup I've used easus before and it'll most likely work for you as you can verify by downloading trial.
It's pretty slow if as most data recovery software is if you have a lot of stuff. I think I had to let it run like 3 days straight but this was like 200GB of stuff
Data recovery techniques should be no brainer or IT 101 for anyone working in IT. There's tons of software and ways to do it out there you just have to invest some time in doing research.
To avoid hassle you'll remind yourself to backup stuff in like 3 different places and never ever work on anything remotely having to do with formatting stuff if you are in a hurry or tired

p.s. One case where no software helped was in a case where I had a spanned volume and one of the drives died. Nothing is going to help you in that case unless you have a backup.
Oh and the other thing that sucks is even if you recover all the files sometimes the filenames aren't preserved so you will have like thousands of files named file001.jpg file999.jpg etc...