Question : Problem: File system written over Ext3: Recovery

Of all the people who should know to double check their data before writing over it with a file system you would think that one of them would be me. But no, I wrote over pretty much all the pictures I've ever taken stored on an ext3 partition with a new NTFS partition and proceed to write just over, say, 30 GB of data to the new partition. I have resigned myself to the loss of that first 30 GB of data, but I desparately want to get any and all of my photos that should be in the remaining space back. They should all have filenames starting with DSC (for the sake of filtering them out automatically If I can find where they're hiding). Anyway, so far I did a full scan of the drive with R-Studio and I can see the partition which should have the data I want to recover. Rstudio also found two smaller ext3 partitions 74.5 GB in size which I can't quite put my finger on and which seem to contain none of the data I'm after.

Back to the main found partition. A scan of it turns up no file system hierarchy. Not surprising since the beginning of the partition was solidly written over. It also, however, turns up absolutely nothing else of use. Any jpegs rstudio turns back are temporary internet files and album art, and all are named simply with numbers. (guess thats just what it does? But still none of the photos come up.) So my question is can I get R Studio to do anything else to hunt down any and all Jpegs on that drive? And are there any other programs out there that would be adept at grabbing images from an overwritten Ext3 filesystem? Thanks in advance for your help.

  --Conrad

Answer : Problem: File system written over Ext3: Recovery

you can use scalpel (a linux utility that will do data carving to retrieve data files with no INODE table)

The beautiful thing is in linux, there is no fragmentation, so you will get clean data carved.

You must have room on the destination mount point to hold the data you are recovering from /dev/sdc etc.

That's why they pay me the big bucks,

Core Data Recovery