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Free NTFS partition recovery

I had Widnows XP running on my system and i installed Ubuntu which deleted all my drives and created a single drive in ext2 format. Now is there way i can recover my files. I had two drives C: and D: and now there is just one drive with Ubuntu on it Any help appreciated

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Step 1: STOP USING THE COMPUTER IMMEDIATELY. – Hello71 Jul 17 '10 at 16:01

marked as duplicate by Sathya♦, harrymc, random♦ Jul 18 '10 at 1:30

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I am afraid there is not a lot what you could do. It sounds like you have deleted you windows partitions and install linux into a partition taking that space. During the installation this partition is newly formatted. Hence all of your data has been overwritten.

There might be a possibility that a forensic lab could find some "shadows" of the old data, since the magnetic information is not totally erased, but this is a very, very expensive process.

Sorry, to bring you bad news, please next time make backup before!

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-1 inaccurate. Data carving tools like foremost and PhotoRec can actually be surprisingly effective even in this situation, provided that the drive was only 'quick formatted' and not completely zeroed out. (Yes, I am speaking from experience.) – Li-aung Yip Feb 28 '12 at 16:43
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Apart from the solutions in other threads I would suggest scalpel. This is also a software for NTFS recovery.

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But the OP wrote a whole new filesystem to the drive. Even with NTFS recovery programs, the partition table and all the partition data was overwritten when Ext2 was created. – TheLQ Jul 17 '10 at 17:13
OK, so I misunderstood. In fact a forensic lab is the only thing which may help, but usually you don't want to spend that amounts of money. – qbi Jul 17 '10 at 21:15

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