Hi guys,

I just recently installed Simply Mepis on one of my laptops. I went the whole hog an completely removed Windows and all Windows NTFS partitions in favour of Linux.

Unfortunately some of the files I backed-up for transferring onto the new system corrupted on the backup drive. I have attempted to recover the data on the backup drive and managed to get all but one file.

So my question is - is there any way from within Linux to interrogate the laptop hard drive (where the file would originally have been located) and see if the data is still on the drive somewhere, or is that data now dead?

Cheers for any help,

Nick

When you installed Linux, you most likely formatted the partitions it was installed on. Unless you want to pay some big bucks to take the drive to a data recovery or forensic specialist to recover the file, it's probably not worth it and it's gone.

What type of file is it? If it is one of the following: jpg,gif,png,bmp,avi,exe,mpg,wav,riff,wmv,mov,pdf,ole,
doc,zip,rar,htm,cpp then you might want to try foremost.
Mepis probably has it prepackaged but it is more sensible to run it from a live cd.

device can be the whole drive eg. /dev/hda Or if you know roughly where the file used to be you can select a partition. Be aware that the longer you have been using the drive, the likelyhood of retrieving the file intact decreases.