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I had an ext3 formatted disk with Debian. I copied files to another Debian in another pc. Then I installed Windows 7 on that disk, with a new ntfs format. Later, I realized I didn't copied some files that I need from Debian. Is there a way that I can get them?

Thanks.

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  • What sort of files are they? It makes a difference as to potential recoverability.
    – emgee
    Apr 1, 2011 at 19:51

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Ewww, if you reformatted the disk, your chances are very very low. The partition table more than likely has been overwritten, so while the data might still be there, it will be in unidentifiable blocks of data. Finding out which file it corresponds too is not necessarily given. Basically, you'd have to reformat back to Ext3 to retrieve the data.

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You might be able to get your files back with photorec. You'll want to boot from a live cd or have the drive in question mounted as a secondary drive (don't boot into it) so you don't overwrite any data. When you restore data, you'll want to have it restore the data to a drive other than the drive with the deleted data.

All the file names will be lost so you'll have to sift through (possibly) thousands of files with meaningless names. You'll want to narrow down the search to only find file types that you are looking for.

You could try the undelete option in testdisk but I think it requires the origional filesystem to exist.

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