[ale] recoverying data after re-install?

[Jim Kinney]

recover after reinstall. sounds like the data is already overwritten
and lost unless it was on a separate partition/drive that was not
attached during the reinstall.

Once the ext3 filesystem has it's inodes rewritten as during a
reinstall, all data about where the file pieces are is gone. You can
find individual file fragments and try and splice them manually using
a hex editor but it's best to cut the losses time wise and get a
backup system instead.

Not trying to dash your hopes of data recovery but it's pretty much a
lost cause unless you got really lucky and had a prior /home dir that
was not overwritten during the reinstall.

I have had decent success with recovery tools for windows fat,
vfat/fat32 and even ntfs. But none of the ext3 tools I've tried have
ever been able to recover data from a drive that has been reinstalled
to. The ext3 system will try and reuse a recently deleted file's
blocks ASAP because the block arrangement is usually pretty tight and
efficient so leaving holes from deleted files like windows is
inefficient use of access time.

That said, there are a few security live CD's that have some decent
tools. try http://www.knoppix-std.org/tools.html as it has a nice tool
for recovering specific file types like jpg's, etc.

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 3:20 PM, John G. Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu> wrote:
> All,
>
> I need to try to recover data from a hard disk after doing a linux
> re-install. On google I see plenty of tools that claim to be able to recover
> data from linux x3 file systesm even after formatting but I would really
> appreciate suggestions for particular ones to try.
>
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness