Welcome to EH-net.

All the same, let this be a lesson to you- always back up your data, especially your critical data.(i'm not saying this to shame you, i once did the same thing with my flash drive, but i had a backup.)

iSmith out.

Well my laptop has a 80gb HDD and when the backtrack installer did it thing it cleared all partitions, then created a 1gb one and from what i can see just copied it self from my flash drive.

so at the moment i have a 80gb hard disk, with a 1gb partition with backtrack files on it, and the rest of the space unpartitioned... and i have a spare 300gb external HDD to dump what i can recover on to...

Hi Loic

i was just browsing the forums and i saw your post so I thought I would register as i might be able to help.

If I had the same problem as you i would do the following.

1. I would boot into a distro such as backtrack or any other that has DD.  using DD I would create a image of the disk onto the external drive. 

dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/usb/hdd.img  (or whatever the external disk is mounted as).


2. once I have that image i would use a tool such as foremost to run through the image and pull alot of the files out.

foremost -v -o /home/loic/dump /mnt/usb/hdd.img

This should pull many filetypes out and place them in folders within a folder called dump (create this folder before you start) in your home drive.


Or you could boot into backtrack, mount the external drive as say /mnt/usb and then run foremost direct to that without creating the image.

foremost -v -o /mnt/usb/dump /dev/hda

This would be quicker than ceating the image first obviously.

I have just put a post up on my blog about simple data recovery at http://synjunkie.blogspot.com

I hope this might have been of use to you.

Thanks.

It's a weird coincidence that data recovery was something I was focusing on in that recent blog post.