Re: Lost Documents and Photos and desktop files and folders

Steven Davies-Morris wrote:
Chris Mohler wrote:

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 5:42 PM, Roger Benham
<rogerbenham2000@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well it can hardly get worse. I downloaded the .iso, burned a CD
of 8.10

I installed 8.10 following instructions (I thought).

So now I have 8.10 installed but everything that I had in 8.04
has disappeared. All my desktop documents and folders, all my
home folder items such as photographs, pictures, documents.

The disadvantage of digital photos as 14 months worth were in
there including those of my wife. I am a selling photographer
(not a geek).

Is there any way I can recover what I lost?

Hi Roger,

If you did a clean install of 8.10 (and performed the step warning
you that "All data on your drive will be lost!", then things are
looking bleak ;(

Hindsight is 20/20 of course - but if you have any sort of
electronic data that you need to keep, you should regularly back up
to DVD and a backup hard drive. Often we tend to learn this lesson
the hard way :(

All that being said, if you are up for some serious forensics, it
might be possible to recover some of your files. I have not done
this in a while, but the general process is this:

1. Do not keep using your hard drive to boot - the longer you do
so, the more of the old files are overwritten!

2. Boot from a live CD (the 8.10 disk should work OK - select "Try
without installing")

3. Mount your hard drive that contained your photos (might be as
easy as right-clicking the volume shown on the desktop, but don't
recall)

4. Use a program such as foremost to recover files. Depending on
size of disk, speed of your PC, etc - this process will likely take
quite some time. See this article (particularly update 2) for an
example of running foremost:
http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/2008/04/howtorecover-and-undelete-text-file-in.html
There's also a bit of chicken-and-egg to watch out for here. Do
NOT recover the files back onto your original drive - doing so will
overwrite files that have yet to be recovered! The ideal scenario
is to use something like an external HD to recover to.

I realize this is just a rough outline, and if you want further
explanation on any of those steps, don't hesitate to ask - there
are others on the list who are far more knowledgeable than I.

Good Luck!

Chris


I've not used Foremost but I have used Ontrack's tools under Windows
to do pretty much the same thing -- in this case I'd go with "raw" as
the partition type. Up front it probably looks right now to Roger like
he's hit the iceberg. But as long as he doesn't panic, and nothing
further is done to the drive in question, a great deal of that
important "wiped" data will be recoverable to another hard drive or a
removable drive.

Reading the blurb at the provided link, it sounds like Foremost will
get back whatever is there that hasn't been overwritten. I suggest
downloading it onto some removable USB media that can then be mounted
by the "live" bootable CD.

Though the horse is out of the barn, for future reference this is
exactly why having /home exist as a separate mountable partition (or
even mountable partition on a different hard drive) is a very good idea.

Finally, if this is all too overwhelming for Roger, if he is by some
chance in Southern California (within a couple of hours drive, give or
take) I'm willing to come to him with a machine, a big spare drive,
and tools to help out in the spirit of been-there-blown-my-head-off.

Hold everything. First did this user update his older Hardy with
Intrepid? If it was a real update the old files are somewhere on his new
system. Perhaps not the exact same directory but still there. If he let
the partition be reset for a new load then it's all gone and nothing can
be done.

So if you did Update please say so and we can look for your things
that were on Hardy.

Karl


--

Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
Linux User
#450462 http://counter.li.org.
PGP 4208 4D6E 595F 22B9 FF1C ECB6 4A3C 2C54 FE23 53A7


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