Dear Friends,
I was installing the Linux Mint KDE-13 on PC, and by mistake WHOLE disk was formatted and Linux Mint was installed. Presently, to recover data I installed WINDOWS-7 and tried to recover the data but the main data was not recovered.

In there any way/hope to recover data? If yes, in which OS I shall try?

Thanks in advance,
-Ganesh

In principle, **some** data might be recovered....

First, until you have a plan, do not do anything else to that disk---ideally, do not run the computer at all.

If the data is really valuable, then consider sending the disk to a professional recovery service. As a minimum, make a clone of the disk before trying any kind of recovery.

If you are going to try and recover data, then you need to connect the disk to another computer (so that the OS will not be running from the that disk.) Then you you can try tools such as photorec to recover files.

Please clarify one thing: You installed Mint to the whole disk, and then installed Win-7 to the same disk? (Also using the whole disk?)

Yes I installed Mint to the whole disk, and then installed Win-7 to the same whole disk. After that with some data recovery tools I could recover good amount of data. But still some important personal photos/videos I could not recover. At present Im on Win-7, please advice tools/softwares to recover photos/videos?

If you simply want data recovery, you can simply try

finaldata.com

"Simply"? "Simply"? Have you actually used the product yourself before deciding to pimp it here? It's commercial software, it's for windows only and I can't find any reference for it on any of the sites I know deal with professional forensics software. And for displaying search results as "Hitted 9" instead of "9 Hits" this does not convey the kind of meticulous attention to detail one expects from a forensics product.

"it's for windows only"
I am afraid you wrong and following link is for Linux although demo/trial only for Windows from the website.


I REALLY have triED this!
http://finaldata.com/Products/?s=PRD&c=9

Only supports EXT2/3 fs on Linux. No support for EXT4, ReiserFS, XFS or even BTRFS.

Agree with unSpawn and the lack of proper English on the site, ON-LINE BUY?

As stated in post #2, do not write anything to the harddisk. Do NOT install software, do NOT allow Windows to do updates. Every write to your HD might corrupt a file that might have been recoverable.

And let me be the bearer of the bad news that you will have lost data. Easiest is to simply put your backups back. But I guess you wouldn't be here if you had those.

Which tools have you tried? I've used photorec to recover photos from a corrupted memory card. I think you can get it as a liveCD with testdisk. Or use an ubuntu liveCD, run that in live mode and install testdisk/photorec.

But whatever you do, don't use your hard disk.