[CentOS] Retrive data from repartitioned / reformatted hard drive?

Fri Jun 29 07:26:21 UTC 2007
Mark Hull-Richter <mhullrich at gmail.com>

On 6/28/07, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The title says it all. One of my clients showed me a 120 GB hard drive
> that his daughter accidentally formatted, according to him. I booted the
> first CD I had at hand - a Slackware 11.0 install CD - and launched
> cdfdisk /dev/hda. cfdisk informed me that there was even no partition
> table. So much for reformatting. cfdisk only shows me 120 GB of free space.
>
> Any way to retrive data on this hard drive? Some magic live distribution
> to read data on repartitioned / reformatted hard drives? any suggestions?
>

If it was actually reformatted, you'll have to go to one of the data
recovery services - getting at data buried under a true reformat
requires some seriously expensive and high-tech equipment.

If it was just repartitioned, you might be able to recover the data
using one of several less (but still) expensive data recovery tools
that are available on the market.  If you work for any IT company, see
if your systems administration / MIS / IT group has something like
that (or just ask around) - many do.

When I worked at Quest Software, the MIS department had these for the
occasional disk crash data recovery, and I was lucky enough to get one
of my partitions back that way, although four files (out of hundreds)
were still damaged and so far unusable.

Good luck.

mhr