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Recovering deleted files on fedora

I have an external hard drive that I had been using to store some photographs, but I accidentally installed Lubuntu on it.
I'd like to know if there's any way to recover the files from it.

I the drive was FAT32 beforehand; I'm not sure, though. It was a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex (1 TB)

Anway, I can't use any of the recovery tools I found, because they can't scan EXT filesystems from Windows.
I'm running a dual-boot, Windows XP and Ubuntu, plus I frequently boot into Puppy Linux from a USB drive, so it really doesn't matter which OS it's for. (No Mac-only software, though.)

Anyway, it's really important that I get these photos back.

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JamesTheAwesomeDude
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  • I'd guess if you used the drive the way Seagate formats it for windows, it was NTFS. So, if you reformat the drive as NTFS you can try whatever windows based tool. The actual format probably doesn't have to be the same as the original, and reformatting will not destroy the data. – goldilocks Feb 02 '13 at 18:47
  • Okay, I was thinking it would be major stupid to format the drive AGAIN, but if you're sure that the remaining data won't be harmed, how would I go about doing this? – JamesTheAwesomeDude Feb 02 '13 at 18:48
  • However you would normally do that in windows. Reformatting doesn't change what is there, otherwise it would take hours to zero the whole disk, etc. It just changes the "meta-information" about what is supposedly there. I don't know if using the same fs type as when the data you are trying to save was lost will matter...so if NTFS doesn't work, reformat as FAT32. – goldilocks Feb 02 '13 at 18:54
  • Note that you will have irretrievably lost some stuff where the ubuntu install was written to, which will be a few GB. – goldilocks Feb 02 '13 at 18:55
  • Windows can't reformat what it can't see, so I'll have to reboot to Linux. When I'm in the disk utility, there's no option to do a straight reformat. (You have to delete the partition, then create a new one in the empty space.) I'll comment back in a few minutes, one that finishes. – JamesTheAwesomeDude Feb 02 '13 at 18:57
  • Deleting and recreating a partition is like reformatting -- again it does not erase/replace anything except some meta-information. So as long as you use exactly the same boundaries, you'll be fine. But it may be easier to just change the fs type in linux (with fdisk) then reformat in windows. – goldilocks Feb 02 '13 at 19:00
  • @JamesTheAwesomeDude, I'd copy the whole disk (e.g., with dd(1)) to a file, and fool around with that one. If you mangle the copy, well, it was only a copy. There are forensic tools that scan a disk just looking for contiguous stretches that look like file contents (like a Word file) and salvage that. As filesystems are fond of allocating files contiguously, this has a decent rate of successes. But I'd suspect that the whole "install an operating system" business has overwritten a lot. – vonbrand Feb 02 '13 at 19:35
  • I wasn't having any luck getting Windows to recognize it, so I just ran the disk recovery tool in Wine. (I know, not the brightest idea, but it says it's found 63 files so far, so it's got to be doing something...) I'm actually a bit cramped for HD space at the moment, so dd isn't an option :( – JamesTheAwesomeDude Feb 02 '13 at 21:40
  • Don't write on the drive. Try PhotoRec from the TestDisk package (store whatever it finds to another disk). If it's JPEG you can give the files meaningful filenames based on EXIF data such as date, size, type of camera used – frostschutz Feb 03 '13 at 00:35

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