There is an NTFS partition with data that was converted into RAW partition by a piece of software. Now it's not readable. File recovery utils easily find all the files (including deleted ones) and it's no problem to recover data file by file. But is there a way to recover the file system as a whole (including metadata, like creation time)? Essentially I am looking for a way of undoing the covertation of the NTFS partition into RAW.
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What steps can I take to try to recover lost or inaccessible data from any storage device?  Answers:   This applies to any computer storage device, e.g. internal/external hard drives, USB sticks, flash memory. The most important thing is to STOP using it, any type of I/O can ruin your chances of a recovery.     We have separate questions covering common problems with USB flash drives in greater detail:
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I want to know how to make a drive ( non-system ) from EXT4 to NTFS. Can anyone help me out?
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Is there a command to recover/undelete deleted files by rm?  $ rm -rf /path/to/myfile   How can I recover myfile? If there is such a tool how can I use it?
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I have an NTFS formatted USB Hard drive that has my personal files backup. Today I mounted the drive to an Oracle Linux system and copied a regular file using the below command (please see below commands). By mistake I used the device file /dev/sdb1 during copy.  mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /sample cp file1 /dev/sdb1   After this I unmounted the drive and connected to Windows system. Now Windows system complains that the drive need to be formatted and/or corrupted.  My question is: can we recover this drive without losing any personal data? How can I view the files available on this drive? Just mounting back to Linux system will show the files?
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Files disappeared from my computer. On running a system search, they were found in C:\found.001\disk0001.chk  I want to go in there and have a look, if there are other files there too, but it gives me an access denied message. I ran chkdsk but it said no problems.   Ideally I would want to run a recovery utility (not the ones for deleted files) that would restore them all to the respective locations. Though I am lucky, I still have them at this weird place.   I am on windows 7.
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I have 2 TB of data on an NTFS drive which I would like to convert to EXT4 filesystem.  My OS runs on a (comparatively) small 60GB SSD.  Is there any way to convert the filesystem, apart from backing up and reformatting?
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I had a 20GB / partition at work that dual-booted with Windows and it quickly ran out of space. I usually do 20GB / and 160GB (or whatever the rest of the hard drive is) as /home, so I intended on recovering the space Windows was taking up and turning that into /home.  That went fine and I was able to mount the partition and rsync all my files over.  However, I forgot that the partition was encrypted, so now all my files are sitting in /home/.ecrypt and /home/$USER is empty.  How can I recover my files from /home/.ecrypt and move them to /home/$USER?  I followed this tutorial:
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Recently something went wrong with my external WD passport. It is not accesible anymore in Win 7 and the type is now currently RAW. I recovered all the data so formatting it is no issue.  I tried formatting it with windows but it seems to be unable to do so. Does anyone have any suggestions how I am able to get this RAW drive back to NTFS or FAT or whatever.. as long as it works.  Thank you in advance
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I was trying to resize my EXT4 partition and something went wrong. I lost it. The space in once consumed is now being represented as Unallocated. How do I recover the partition?
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This is a followup on my original post  which may be deleted in the future.  In the process of backing up my audio books, I "permanently" removed a folder (with subfolders) that I had already exclusively moved to that drive. It's path is /media/gratis/Seagate Expansion Drive/Audiobooks/Jason Dark. The sole folder in that should be called John Sinclair; but I'm not sure about that.  Which tool offers the best chances to recover those files? I haven't written plenty on that drive afterwards; so I hope for the best. It's not that other methods failed; I just cant get my head around what to do and I want to be cautious. It's a NTFS Drive.  According to testdisk it has an "EFI GPT" Partition table.  Disk /dev/sdb - 5000 GB / 4657 GiB - CHS 608001 255 63, sector size=512 - Seagate Expansion Desk, FW:9401   Information According to "Disks" (Ubuntu Standard Software):  NTFS; GUID Partition Table; [...] Partition Type: Microsoft Reserved   Attempt 1: First off, ntfsprogs seems to no longer be in repos (those mentioned by another user); but it is already installed on my machine so no problems there. I always get the error:     Access is denied because the NTFS volume is already exclusively opened. The volume may be already mounted, or another software may use it which could be identified for example by the help of the 'fuser' command. You can use force option to avoid this check, but this is not recommended and may lead to data corruption.   Although I only just plugged it in and even quit Nautilus by force (nautilus -q).   Therefore, I ran sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sdb2 -f. That gave me a list of a bunch of files, 205013 to be exact. Now, what I want is the content of the directory .../Audiobooks/Jason\ Dark/ to be restored. What do I have to do? It's contents are .m4b &amp; .opus files and folders, of course.
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Well, I have accidentally deleted my Ubuntu drive. I just want to recover all the contents of /home.   Is there a way to do it? I referred to , where I need to specify the extensions of files. And in my case, I don't know actual extensions. So, is there any utility which can let me recover my /home folder alone?  I have not even formatted that drive or touched it at all. So no write has been done on that drive.  If you have suggestions on how to recover, please tell me.
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I've resized my C:\ partition but now I can't boot anymore. I tried to use CHKDSK to analyse the disk but keep getting this error:      CHKDSK does not support RAW disk.    I suppose the partition is damaged or changed to RAW format. So, how can I restore it to NTFS or at least recover my data?
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I installed Ubuntu on a hard drive that had Windows XP installed so I could dual-boot the two operating systems. Everything was fine but now I can't boot into XP or Ubuntu. I had some important documents in the Ubuntu partition and the hard drive is still working, so how can I recover those files from a working Ubuntu installation? Where should I look for the broken Ubuntu installation?
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I have already had the same problem before. On that occasion, I found a program that could scan my entire hard drive for string pieces so I could recover it. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the program. It had to access the hard drive data directly, normal searches won't get any data from the hard drive before formatting.
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I've experienced some freaky data loss in Windows 7 &amp; tried to recover the files. (.) The work data is safe but I also decided to copy everything missing back into Windows directory &amp; rebooted thinking that the recovery mode would be a better option for rolling back to a restore point. Shockingly, the only options System Restore gave me were from November 2010 (2.5 years old) despite many updates &amp; installs since. I thought that only the dates were corrupted but when I scanned for software to be affected by the roll-back, the list included everything installed since then. On top of that, something got screwed up in the OS and I can't boot even into Safe Mode - the system BSODs supposedly on compbatt.sys (which I've already tried to copy from the original distro).  Since I have many settings not saved, I don't want to perform a clean install of the OS. The problem is that the install disc keeps on telling me that upgrade can be performed only from the fully-booted system and not from the recovery mode. This is very annoying because all previous versions of Windows could be upgraded from DOS or PE.  Thus, the question is: how can I fix my OS without formatting the drive if it's not bootable &amp; System Restore is broken?
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I just accidentally mounted a new drive to a folder that already contained files.  I don't care about them and have them somewhere else, but that folder appears empty now.  I'm curious what happened to the files.  Are they simply deleted by Linux?
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I have just formatted an ext4 partition to fat32 using gparted.  In which directions should I tread in my attempt to recover?