Data recovery from re-partitioned drive possible?

Operating Systems & Open Source
1

Hi,

I'm in a little bit of a predicament. Some time ago I re-purposed the old family computer for a Linux box, the thing was archaic, abandoned, nobody had used it in years. So I figured anything of importance would have been moved to one of the other many millions of devices we have around the house... apparently not. I find out now, months after I'd re-purposed it that there were shiploads of family photos on the thing.

Anyway, In hope that the small space that I've been taking up on the drive since the linux install hasn't totally wrecked what was on it to begin with I've had a look around for recovery utilities, and one that I've come across is called PhotoRec.

So my question is. If the 500gb hard drive originally using ntfs with its windows vista partition was overwritten, lets say 3 times, with ext4 linux installs, would there be any chance of data recovery from what was stored on the original ntfs partitions? My hopes tell me that it shouldn't have been completely overwritten yet and there should be remaining data on the bitlevel that has the potential to be sniffed up by PhotoRec but I'm not sure if it's the right tool for the job.

What would you suggest I do?

2

From reading around I've deduced that there is still the possibility that if the data hasn't been overwritten then it should be recoverable to some extent. There may be issues with disk fragmentation and block padding etc. Though the go at this stage is to remove the hard drive and install it into my main desktop and run PhotoRec on it, copying the output files to a spare 1 tb I'm not using. Hopefully I'll recover some of it.

3

I believe Gparted also has some file restoring utilities if you want to give it a try. As long as you didn't overwrite the files there's a chance. It sounds messy though.

4

TestDisk is another tool that can be used for recovery of data.

5

PhotoRec comes with TestDisk, thanks though :)