Accidentally reformatted a EXT4 drive to NTFS; lost all data. What are my options?

Question

I'm going to sound like a complete idiot here, but I was installing Windows 7 on a new partition, accidentally selected my Linux partition, and hit install. The installer (which had no "Are you sure you want to reformat this disk" alert, thank you very much Microsoft) ran for like thirty seconds before I came to my senses and realized I was running it on my Linux Media Storage drive, which showed up in the installer dialog as a new, unformatted drive because Windows couldn't recognize it. I had to do a hard shutdown to get the thing to quit in the end.

I'm absolutely heartbroken. I immediately booted into Linux and all of my media files are gone. What are my options? Can anybody recommend any good file recovery software? I've done a google search but I can't tell which software options I can trust. I'm willing to pay to get this data back. It took me years to put together and organize.

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

There are many previous posts regarding recovering data from deleted linux partitions.

That being said:

testdisk might be able to recover the partition. You can also try to individually undelete the files. Otherwise you can try recovering the files using photorec. Photorec can recover files but it loses all the filename information. Photorec can also only recover files that it knows how to recover.

Answer 2

TestDisk is probably your best bet here. Its very well known undelete tool.

Answer 3

I accidentally formatted an ext4 partition to NTFS in my Ubuntu 16.04 recently and was able to recover the full partition successfully by running a file system check.

sudo fsck.ext4 -v /dev/sda10

I recorded the steps in this blog post. However note that the scenario is a bit different. Hope this helps someone else.