Recovering 2 drives with all files deleted
by fakie_flip from LinuxQuestions.org on (#54PE9)
I was messing around in the KDE settings when I noticed that my windows borders were changing, and I didn't change them. I went to change them back and noticed that all but 2 themes were gone. I started switching between windows seeing if they were all changed, and my system was becoming sluggish. I thought maybe this was a problem that a reboot would fix or a login and logout would fix. My system had become too sluggish to reboot it anytime soon so I did a alt+sys req REISUB.
Now I had a new strange problem. My computer wasn't booting Linux. It would try to boot from the usb drive or anything but Linux. I have Slackware with KDE on my usb drive as a live system. I booted it up and discovered that all of my files from 2 drives had been wiped except for very few that might have been in my ram and written to disk right before I issued the reboot.
I suspect it was a buggy script that could have caused it. The important thing for right now is not what caused it but can it be recovered. How much of it can be recovered? I can tell this is not the result of a faulty drive or a reformat. The filesystems on both drives are perfectly intact. There's a bunch of free space that wasn't there before. I've been mounting the drives with read-only and have not written anything to disk.
One drive is a 1 terabyte that was formatted as NTFS because Windows had to be able to access it too. The other drive is is a 200-300 gb SSD with ext4.
I'm about to try photorec. What else do I need to know about recovering the files besides don't write anything new to the disks? How much of it can be recovered? What's the chances of doing a successful recovery? Is there anything besides photorec I should be using?
Now I had a new strange problem. My computer wasn't booting Linux. It would try to boot from the usb drive or anything but Linux. I have Slackware with KDE on my usb drive as a live system. I booted it up and discovered that all of my files from 2 drives had been wiped except for very few that might have been in my ram and written to disk right before I issued the reboot.
I suspect it was a buggy script that could have caused it. The important thing for right now is not what caused it but can it be recovered. How much of it can be recovered? I can tell this is not the result of a faulty drive or a reformat. The filesystems on both drives are perfectly intact. There's a bunch of free space that wasn't there before. I've been mounting the drives with read-only and have not written anything to disk.
One drive is a 1 terabyte that was formatted as NTFS because Windows had to be able to access it too. The other drive is is a 200-300 gb SSD with ext4.
I'm about to try photorec. What else do I need to know about recovering the files besides don't write anything new to the disks? How much of it can be recovered? What's the chances of doing a successful recovery? Is there anything besides photorec I should be using?