CentOS - Jun 2007 - Retrive data from repartitioned / reformatted hard drive?

Hi,

The title says it all. One of my clients showed me a 120 GB hard drive 
that his daughter accidentally formatted, according to him. I booted the 
first CD I had at hand - a Slackware 11.0 install CD - and launched 
cdfdisk /dev/hda. cfdisk informed me that there was even no partition 
table. So much for reformatting. cfdisk only shows me 120 GB of free space.

Any way to retrive data on this hard drive? Some magic live distribution 
to read data on repartitioned / reformatted hard drives? any suggestions?

thanks,

Niki

On 29/06/07, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The title says it all. One of my clients showed me a 120 GB hard drive
> that his daughter accidentally formatted, according to him. I booted the
> first CD I had at hand - a Slackware 11.0 install CD - and launched
> cdfdisk /dev/hda. cfdisk informed me that there was even no partition
> table. So much for reformatting. cfdisk only shows me 120 GB of free space.
>
> Any way to retrive data on this hard drive? Some magic live distribution
> to read data on repartitioned / reformatted hard drives? any suggestions?
If the data's still there and it's just the partition table that's
been blown away I think there are a few things that will scan a disk
looking for the markers for partition information and attempt to
reconstruct one. If that worked you theoretically can just repartition
identically and the data may magically appear.

http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02006-06-09&l=113#l

Will

On 6/28/07, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The title says it all. One of my clients showed me a 120 GB hard drive
> that his daughter accidentally formatted, according to him. I booted the
> first CD I had at hand - a Slackware 11.0 install CD - and launched
> cdfdisk /dev/hda. cfdisk informed me that there was even no partition
> table. So much for reformatting. cfdisk only shows me 120 GB of free space.
>
> Any way to retrive data on this hard drive? Some magic live distribution
> to read data on repartitioned / reformatted hard drives? any suggestions?
>
If it was actually reformatted, you'll have to go to one of the data
recovery services - getting at data buried under a true reformat
requires some seriously expensive and high-tech equipment.

If it was just repartitioned, you might be able to recover the data
using one of several less (but still) expensive data recovery tools
that are available on the market.  If you work for any IT company, see
if your systems administration / MIS / IT group has something like
that (or just ask around) - many do.

When I worked at Quest Software, the MIS department had these for the
occasional disk crash data recovery, and I was lucky enough to get one
of my partitions back that way, although four files (out of hundreds)
were still damaged and so far unusable.

Good luck.

mhr

Niki Kovacs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The title says it all. One of my clients showed me a 120 GB hard drive 
> that his daughter accidentally formatted, according to him. I booted 
> the first CD I had at hand - a Slackware 11.0 install CD - and 
> launched cdfdisk /dev/hda. cfdisk informed me that there was even no 
> partition table. So much for reformatting. cfdisk only shows me 120 GB 
> of free space.
>
> Any way to retrive data on this hard drive? Some magic live 
> distribution to read data on repartitioned / reformatted hard drives? 
> any suggestions?
I have used testdisk with excellent results.  Read about its features, 
capabilities and limitations at http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Good luck!

On 6/28/07, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>
wrote:
> Any way to retrive data on this hard drive? Some magic live distribution
> to read data on repartitioned / reformatted hard drives? any suggestions?
I believe there are partition table recovery tools on the Ultimate
Boot CD and some similar PE packages.  Look at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery