Help me recover my data!

[AmEv]

I have 2 partitions on my 2TB HDD, split in half: One NTFS, one EXT4. Last night, all the files just flat-out disappeared. The partitions themselves are still there, the data on both are gone.
Just gone!

It says the NTFS is 100% empty, while the EXT4 is 6% used. Which, I believe, may mean the data is still intact.

Any help?

[f8l_0e]

Normally I'm all about the open source. In fact, I'm posting this from Ubuntu 12.04 64bit. In this case, I recommend R-Studio. It is $80, but it has worked miracles for me before. As with ANY partition/file recovery software, you need a second drive to recovery the missing files to. Writing to the drive that you are looking for deleted files on WILL cause data to be overwritten. Do not write anything to any of the partitions on this drive until you run the recovery.

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/

[AmEv]

Gah. I'm on a Kubuntu 12.04 64 machine myself.

I'm going to leave that HDD unplugged 'til I can get a new one.

Dang WD failing drives.....

And dang tight economy... [/rant]

[f8l_0e]

I doubt it was the drive. HDD's typically fail in one of three ways.

1) Drive is not recognized by BIOS/UEFI .. probably HDD logic board.
2) Click of death and drive is unreadable .. probably bad head amplifier.
3) One or more bad sectors .. most of the data is there.

If it is a failing drive, it would have to be bad sectors that make up the NTFS MFT entries (multiple ones, I believe) AND multiple inode entry sectors for the EXT4 partitons. I just don't see that happening.

Did you run anything last night that would have been touching partition data? What OS were you running last night, Linux or Windows?

[AmEv]

Linux. 100%.


It should be noted that the HDD does have a few thousand bad sectors....

[Luke122]

Spinrite has been Awesome for me.. it's saved so many drives, I cant even begin to count.

[AmEv]

OK, when I unplugged the SATA cable, it didn't load the GUI. Because, for whatever reason, it saw the boot drive as sdb. Now that it's out, it's sda again. Re-installing Kubuntu. Hopefully, I can see the stuff again....

[AmEv]

Good news, and bad news:

The NTFS stuff came back! :)
EXT4 stuff still hidden. :(

Running "sudo fsck /dev/sdb2 -vfc" to see how it goes.