Data Recovery Help

[SnackMasterX]

I am in the process of converting my data over to gentoo so that I can get rid of winDOZE and I have been using a 500 gig drive to transfer data to so that I can cut/paste it to another drive once I get under Gentoo. I was using an ext3 partition for this which I did not like very much because I did not trust windows to write to an ext3 partition. The drivers I have been using were the Ext2IFS so that I would have read/write support under windows. Long story short my distrust in windows ability to write to an ext3 partition did not go without though to it...I lost over 300 gigs of data and I was wondering if anyone knows of any kind of data recovery software for windows or linux. With my current ext3 experience under widnows I would prefer any data recovery software to be used on linux but if theres something that works well under windows I will give it a try. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Ohh and I almost forgot to mention, when I am under windows or linux it says the 500 gig drive has no space left on it but the only folder that its showing is 176 gigs.

[MrCanis]

Hello,
the only way I know to recover a ext3 partition is with fsck and of course from a Linux box. But for me sounds that like a screwed partition. Try this: take your drive and connect it on a Linux box and try fsck, from the command line. And make sure that it isn't mounted, who knows what's really wrong with that drive if M$ has written on it.
_________________
The 666 is behind the detail.

[SnackMasterX]

I agree with that, I am running on a dual boot machine but during the bootup process it auto-mounts the drive which is where I think the problem might be. This might have been my fault more that I think of it. I was writing data to it last night then went into hibernation mode through windows then turned the computer back on to load linux. At this point I more care to see what data I lost than actually recovering it. I couldn't put all my data on there and alot of important data I left under windows instead of transfering it to this drive.

[jcat]

It's a little late now, but I would have done this in reverse!

Mount the windows partition under Linux and copy from their, NOT mount the Linux partitions under Win and copy.



Cheers,
jcat

[SnackMasterX]

Well I have found a solution, after I lost the data I put a bit more time into research for how to make a fat32 partition which was what I originally intended to use to transfer data and I managed to find a utility that would allow me to format a partition of any size to fat32.

[jcat]

FAT32 partitions for transfer has been traditional in the past. But NTFS support is quite mature now, read access has always be great but even write access is very good now as well. So (especially if you're just migrating data to *NIX), mount the NTFS partition as read only and copy files over.



Cheers,
jcat

[SnackMasterX]

The only thing I was unsure of with NTFS read support under linux was when the computer has compressed files. Windows compresses files automatically to save space and I hate that because it takes longer to execute files after it does that. I was just unsure if linux would have a problem reading the compressed files or if it would be able to decompress them as windows does prior to opening a file. I am not too familiar with the NTFS support under linux so I am not sure on alot of things for it.

[jcat]

Ahh, yes, I think you're right about compressed files

Windows only compresses files if you specifically enable that feature, it shouldn't be on by default as far as I know.


Anyway, good luck with your data recovery!



Cheers,
jcat

[SnackMasterX]

Well M$ seems to think its better to enable features and put things into the OS that we couldn't possibly need (though file compression could be useful, would be nice to have the option to disable it). When they came out with Vista I actually was interested in trying it out. I had to use it one day at work and was sent out of the office for the numerous amount of 4 letter words I was making up in regards to that OS. Luckily I was able to use an Ubuntu install for the remainder of the day so things didn't get as bad as they could have. I gave up on the data recovery though, I had nothing that could recover my information but I was able to view what I lost and it wasn't anything too terribly important, I just need my brother to bring his copy of LOTR extended edition home sometime so I can backup the DVDs again, that was the only thing I lost that I wanted to keep.