Please help me to get my formatted disk back

Hello Team,

This is Hareesh from India. The main reason to turn up to Zorin Community is that, Recently I have installed Zorin OS by replacing with my old windows 7 files. I thought, Zorin OS formats only C drive(OS of Windows 7) Unfortunately all the data in the Drives (D,E,F) was totally Vanished. After the Zorin OS installation, I found only drive with no files regarding my past personal data.

I would like to get my previous data back as it had so much of valuable information.

Please consider my Concern and let me know any ideas to get rid of my problems.

Eagerly awaiting your valuable reply.

Thank you

Hi, I would be extremely surprised if you would be able to do this - that is why it is ALWAYS recommended for whatever OS (Windows or GNU/Linux) you are intending to install that you backup your DATA first - you would need to pay for expensive data recovery to get those files back - and no guarantees.

One thing that helped me in a similar situation and I managed to recover almost all data lost, was testdisk.
Preferably you boot to your PC using a live USB or Live CD, you install testdisk and then you open it and search through the drive that you lost your data to see what could be recovered.

Once you find your data you copy/paste same in an external USB drive.

sudo apt-get install testdisk

Also various video tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=testdisk


Believe me, even if you pay for a technician to come home and try to recover your data, he would most probably use testdisk...

Great job madvinegar! 120 blue jewels to you sir!

Like madvinegar I have in the past used testdisk. ( you should know it takes forever to run so be ready to wait )

however it is possible the data isn't gone, just not mounted... you might not have to recover it anyhow.
I would suggest you run this first

Code:

dmesg | egrep "sd[a-z]:"

everything inside the single quotes. It should look something like this.

Code:

"[   1.243903]  sda: sda1 sda2"

In all likely hood you have a few of them, sda (your primary HDD) and sdb, sdc, etc... and depending on how you had your computer set up, all you may need to do is mount them something like this.

Code:

mkdir ./mount_sdb1
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 ./mount_sdb1


then you should be able to see the file by opening up your file explorer and going to the location "~/" and you should have the mounts there.

If you have any issues please run this command (in terminal) and provide us the output.

Code:

dmesg | egrep "sd[a-z]:"

or if your getting an error just paste the error.