Hi guys! I am new to the Linux OS and I seem to understand nothing about it. Recently I sent my laptop for repair and my OS was changed from Windows 7 to SLED 11, which is the factory OS of my computer. All of my data was erased from the laptop (750 GB), so currently I am looking for a data recovery software.
Before anything, can anyone tell me if it is possible to recover any data, as an OS has been deleted and replaced with another one (I had 2 partitions on Win7 and they have been deleted)?
And if so, could you recommend me any software that I can use ON SLED 11 to recover my data or if I have an *.exe recovery software could I run it under Linux with a program called Wine? Would it do the work?
Please anyone who has any suggestions please say.
I will be very grateful if you help me recover my data.
Since the OS has been re-installed the disk will have been formatted so I’m not optimistic about you getting anything back. The first thing you need to do is stop using the disk. The more you use the disk the less the chances of recovering anything.
If you want to try recovering data you should do that either by booting the laptop from a LiveCD such as Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/ and have another disk attached via USB to save any recovered files to, or install the recovery tools on a different computer, take the disk out of the laptop and attach it to that computer.
I’ve previously used PhotoRec http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download to recover some files from a disk (ext3 I think) that had developed some sort of fault that had screwed up the filesystem, but in that case the data was still on the drive, it hadn’t been overwritten and the disk hadn’t been formatted.
A professional data recovery service may be more successful, but they usually cost a non-trivial amount and there’s no guarantee they’ll get anything.