On Apr 12, 2005 6:47 AM, Amit Karpe amitkarpe@vsnl.net wrote:
Hi all , I need help and suggestions from you experts and Gurus . While reinstalling SuSE 9.2 it hv overwritten on my previous SuSE 9.2 Linux Partition . I did not find any Reser FS Data Recovery tools . I want to know is thee any way to recover data from that partition ? Is there any software which may help me ? Is there any professional solution provider in Pune ?
I repeat my problem in detail . I allready had installed SuSE 9.2 on /dev/hda2 . And I had free ( empty ) partition on /dev/hda3 .
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Since the SuSE installer reformatted /dev/hda2, all inode information for the "previous" file system was overwritten and is gone. The installer explicity warns the user about this.
Professional data recovery services might be able to do a low level, sector by sector read and recreate data (if not overwritten with the new install). Usually, this solution is expensive. I did a Google search for such service centres in India (see URL below):
http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=hard+disk+data+recovery&btnG=...
(Neither am I affiiliated with any vendor nor have I used their service).
I am sure you have learnt a lot do's and don'ts from this experience.
Here are a couple of pointers. Use a bootable Linux distro (like Knoppix) to create the partitions, this forces you to plan the disk partitions apriori. As a rule of thumb, even on a desktop system, create a separate partition for /home (user data). You can use this partition, **w/o reformat**, as /home for multiple Linux distros. During installs, choose the "expert' option for selection of HDD partitions and ensure that /home device is not selected by the installer to mount any another file system. At least once a week, do a full backup of /home to a tar.gz file and then copy it onto a CD-RW media or transfer it to another HDD/system. This ensures that at worst case, you are out of luck for about a week's worth of data.
Please keep us posted if you do come across tools/procedures to recover your lost data.
Good luck. -- Arun Khan