How to recover partitions and files in Linux!

Here's how to recover partitions and files in Linux, provided not too much of the data has been overwritten.
Patreon support : / doriandotslash
Music by MrGamer (@AndreasRohdin): / gamermachine

[@moisesa.monzonveitia9150]

Thanks Dorian! You helped me to recover a 1T of info accidentally deleted with clean command in diskpart in windows! God bless you man!

[@Doriandotslash]

Fantastic, that's really great to hear!

[@littlebigsnake1697]

Me also use diskpart clean command my all data deleted thanks for your help

[@eliot1197]

Can I use parted magic instead to do the same?

[@horizon42q]

Excellent teacher. You go step by step at the correct speed. I learned a new important skill today.

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks! 🙂

[@imsamiurrahman]

Man you're a life saver. I can't thank you enough for this amazing video.

[@Doriandotslash]

Glad it helped!

[@AnasYaseen]

Thanks a lot Dorian. Although testdisk didn't help me, I saw your comment below about photorec and I managed to recover a lot of my lost files although I deleted my partitions and went from Windows to Linux

[@Doriandotslash]

That’s great to hear!

[@JoeSamehHatab]

انا عندي نفس المشكلة غيرت من Windows 10 لZorin OS 16 وشيلت كله من غير قصد ايه العمل؟

[@HetmanRecovery]

🐧 How to Recover Linux Data After OS Reinstallation or Disk Format 🐧 - kzbin.info/www/bejne/bKbOnZqhisdng6c

[@WallyJ2K]

Had an old WD MyDrive NAS that showed the dreaded solid red light and used your method to rebuild the partition table and copy my files over to a new drive. Thanks for saving my drive and my data!!

[@rectify2003]

Dorian, Thankyou for being respectful to your Subscribers. You always respond. Thankyou and Happy New Year

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks! I do try to respond to everyone but I sometimes miss some or take a couple days. It's getting harder and harder to reply to all the comments because I keep getting more and more :) Happy New Year to you as well!

[@rectify2003]

DorianDotSlash Im glad your channel is getting busier. I tried to learn Red Hat a few years ago, but gave up as it was too hard. I started on Linux Mint, a while ago, and actually enjoy it, and now have it as a Dual boot on my pc. Boot = Win 10 or Linux Mint

[@ferouihamza]

man i can't thank you enough,you just helped me recover 2Tb worth of files

[@Doriandotslash]

That's awesome to hear!

[@eznix]

Great video on recovery options. Thanks. I have always installed testdisk, just in case, but I never had a need to use it. backups are definitely easier. :-)

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks! It can come in handy!

[@srishtinagu1857]

Hey, this video was a great help! Thanks a lot!

[@voldemortvi4264]

you have no idea how much did u help me with this video , god bless you man

[@Reziac]

Very useful. Definitely going in the toolkit.

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks!

[@danielyount9812]

Had not used this function since ext2 - ext3 days of Linux. But will try this out and wonder what partition types it can recover, since we now have LVM as well as classical primary and extended types. Having both ability to recover partitions and files is really cool need to do this just to see it happen. Very cool.

[@_nosma]

I LOVE YOU!!!! THANKS! I almost gave up and go hide to a forest away from civilization...

[@MrDbzfan001]

Thank you. This was exactly what I needed when i deleted my media drive by reinstalling Windows

[@Doriandotslash]

I'm hoping it helps out many people :)

Best explanation yet, thanks

[@nestorjaraba4540]

I write this comment because you still follow to save people to lose his files, that's amazing, Thanks so much.

[@papperme]

Thanks. One of the most best skills one need to master. Mighty thanks. Many thumbs ups

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you!

[@Gabriel-yd9jw]

Great video Thanks

[@sprtwlf9314]

Thank you. This helped me so much. 🙏

[@abdelilaheabdel5760]

you are a life saver man , thank you

[@elnorag]

you saved me.. thank you very very much,man

[@adrianomuller3569]

You MTF! You did it! Thank you soo much! Life saver achived!

[@allyouneed71]

Brilliant... worked first try... thanks,,, ya saved my data

[@kallenosf]

Thanks for the video! While trying to install Ubuntu on an external drive, I deleted the two partitions of my macbook pro internal drive, with gparted. Following your video, I managed to recover the EFI partition(although I still can't boot to macOS), but I wasn't able to recover the other partition where all my data are. I tried Intel and Mac partition table type but no luck. Testdisk suggest to change the disk geometry. Could that be the problem? (After deleting the partitions I didn't write anything on the disk, it didn't even boot)

[@rectify2003]

Thanks again

[@guntherwallendorf769]

Hi Dorian - great tutorial thank you very much. I was running a split drive with Ubuntu and windows. While working in Ubuntu it ask to do an update, I clicked on install updates, while it was doing that I was doing some others searches on the web. The update froz. I shut down when restarted my laptop would not open the Ubuntu. But I can still use windows. I created a new bootable USB with Ubuntu 20.04 and can run it from the flash drive. I wanted to use the testdisk recover my data before reinstalling Ubuntu on my laptop. I can get testdisk to work on windows, but I don't seem to be able to find my data. I am not able to run the testdisk in Ubuntu. Any ideas?

[@wesleymaicon002]

Thank you very much!

[@Gokraut]

I have an lsi controller with 20 sas disks in raid 5 giving me 12.7tb but the partition is gone. I have an ssd with Ubuntu that I had to reinstall because the os became corrupt. When I went to reinstall ubuntu the raid array showed up as /dev/sda but no partitions. Not sure what to do

[@josiahgil]

does this work if i accidentally deleted the wrong partition, but it merged into a larger one? Is there an extra step for a partition that was deleted and became merged? Thanks.

[@palaciokaesar]

man you literally saved my life, there where so many important files in my corrupted windows partition that I thought I was literally going to kill myself, thank you so much for bringing me peace to my mind

[@francoalbano5642]

Hola. Realmente estoy muy interesado por todo este proceso. Estoy con un gran problema. Parece que borre el sistema de archivos de una particion redimensionandola, moviendola 2mb y devolviendola 2mb. Este video tambien funciona para esos casos?

[@tomaspilcer1014]

hi, can I use this method to recover data from synology NAS? BTRFS file system, thanx

[@Placebo6]

Thanks!

[@oussamakifo9915]

Very well explained tuto ❤ thank you it works, but I couldn't recover some pictures :( , they are their but I'm unable to view them, there is an icon of "a clock" on them and their sizes are 0 bytes. Is there any chance to get them back ? EDIT: Nevermind I solved, I was copying the files to a directory in the live session, so apparently the size of the coppied files are bigger than the free size in the live session, I tried to copy the files to another free patition on my hard disk, what I recomand you to do is to NOT copy the recovered files to the same partition you are trying to recover.

[@ProfessorBarth]

This was absolutely perfect. Huge relief. Thank you!

[@Kola-wz3zk]

Thanks!!

[@MisterNyte]

When I go to list files, i get an error that says "Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged." I've tried fsck and it came back clean but i still get the error. Any idea how I can fix this?

[@NoEgg4u]

Is gparted-live designed strictly for Linux based partition/file recovery operations? If you boot from a live gparted-live USB flash drive, can you explore and recover Windows based partitions and files deleted from NTFS file systems (and FAT32, etc)? Great video, by the way.

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you. Yes you can access NTFS and FAT partition from within Linux. There are utilities like testdisk and ntfsundelete that can help you there. But you will need to ensure the Windows partition is not encrypted with Bitlocker, and that the Windows fast startup (hibernation) is disabled. Otherwise you can't access the partition.

[@NoEgg4u]

@@Doriandotslash Good info. I was not aware of ntfsundelete. I will never use Bitlocker. It is closed source code from Microsoft -- a huge Spyware company. I still use Windows. But I am going to be switching over to Linux on my next PC, and I will use VeraCrypt (and I imagine that files lost in a VeraCrypt volume are gone for good). Any Linux OS is far superior to Windows, for security, privacy, reliability, and performance. But I am new to Linux, and want to choose a good distro. I have narrowed my choices down to MX Linux and Parrot Security. MX Linux seems to be very popular, and will probably be around for the long haul. But Parrot offers an AnonSurf feature (funneling all traffic via TOR), which you can toggle on and off. So I like that. But I am unsure of Parrot's overall functionality. For example, I do not know if it will be good for gaming. It is Debian based, so I am assuming that if Debian is good for gaming, then Parrot should be, too? I'll find out. I am also intrigued with Qubes OS. I would love that OS as a daily driver, as it seems to be the King of compartmentalizing your on-line life. TAILS is also very good, but too restrictive (for your own good) for a daily driver for me. I would go with Qubes, but it is basically a virtual machine generator, and has too many specific hardware requirements and virtualization is not good for gaming. I threw a lot out there, hoping maybe you would offer a recommendation for or against a distro. Finding reputable, knowledgeable folks for help is not easy. There is a blizzard of information out there, and it is hard for a newbie to know what is what. Any advice is appreciated. Cheers!

[@ivatinal]

Thanks a lot ❤❤❤❤

[@oscarfilms9375]

Thanks, today I accidentally chose the wrong side to install a Linux distribution on and therefore wiped it. Havnt written anything else to it but accidentally installed an os. Do you think this will still work?

[@vane3156]

Thanks bro

[@AppsTricksByNazakatUmrani]

Today before messing up, I already had installed gparted iso, and booted in usb, because I was going to resize partition and install prime os which becomes my 3rd operating system, and all things were great, but when I booted in prime os, then prime os just gave me notifications for usb not detecting and something like that, it was detecting whole hard disk and trying to mount it, but it was unable to so it gave me two options use for portable or use for system by formatting, I was not sure that it is the whole disk or a partition which has prime os installed, so first I choosed portable use but still got issues then I formatted it by second option, and then something wrong happened, I shutdown prime os and tried to boot in grub, but there was nothing, no linux no windows, my 3 os are gone, so I just tried many options, I had Hiren boot cd which is windows live usb with many tools but it isn't able to detect ext4 and btrfs formats, and my main data is in ext4 partition, windows partition only have games, so then I saw your video, This gparted iso is great if it will help me, it is in progress, I hope it will get everything back, otherwise I have a backup, but I don't want to reinstall both os and reconfigure them, reinstall apps and games and everything again

[@chintirobby192]

Does this work with raw hard drive too?

[@luisribeiro2239]

Hello there! Many folders under a directory on my external hard disk all of sudden disappeared. Testdisk didn't help on my case. I didn't deleted those directories. They just disappeared, and I have no idea how to recover them. I'm using UBUNTU 22.04. Any help? Thanks

[@calebkulujili1395]

I know it's an old video, but what if i overwrite the whole harddrive which had Linux OS by installing Windows 7/10/11 then I want to recover my files that were in the Linux OS

[@kxx1v9]

I don’t know if you’re going to see this comment but yoı definitely saved my really important data. And now I know how to recover files aswell, that’s a pretty new thing. Great video, thanks a lot man.

[@Doriandotslash]

That’s great to hear. I’m glad it helped you out. Cheers!

[@kxx1v9]

@@Doriandotslash It feels good to see content creators like you still exist. Replying to a comment from an old video immediately? You got new subscriber. :)

[@Doriandotslash]

@@kxx1v9 Thanks very much! I do try hard to reply to every comment. Sometimes I get a little behind but I try to catch up eventually :) Cheers!

[@vipulsingh7362]

Hello sir, I've lost my partitions while switching my computer from Windows to linux and accidently I've erased and Installed the OS. Now I wanted to recover those partitions cuze they contains lot of files. Please let me know how I'm gonna recover those lost partitions along with their files.

[@Doriandotslash]

This is a tricky one. Because, if you erased the Windows partition and then installed Linux overtop of it, then it's very likely that most of that data has been lost. If you follow the steps in the video, and testdisk is unable to find your old Windows partition, then you might be out of luck. Your best bet is to try to use PhotoRec which you can find with a Google search. Follow their website's instructions and you may be able to recover some files. If that doesn't work, you can try RecuperaBit, but that one is a little hard to use. Good luck with the recovery!

[@aravindmanavalan6677]

please bro help me I deleted boot partition of windows and changed partitions to Ext4 but now all data went missing i dont know how to recover please help me I lost all my project works

[@karthiksubramani6296]

When I run Sudo testdisk, it says harddisk not found. I want to recover some data which were in my harddisk. can you please help me with this?

[@srishtinagu1857]

Hi, I was using this life saving method for retrieving my data but got this error now when I hit 'P' to list files--Error- No file found, filesystem may be damaged. Please help me!!

[@Doriandotslash]

If that’s the case, then the file system is likely damaged beyond the ability to recover the files. Not much that can be done at this point unfortunately.

[@nick-ek6nd]

Hey brother i installed Ubuntu few days age..some of my files go to unallocated space..so i used testdisk through your video.. some of the files recover but the big partion don't recover.. I'm unable to recover my data🥲🥲😭... kindly please help me.

[@linuxinside6188]

You are awesome .

[@Doriandotslash]

Thank you!

[@ayan0925j]

After recovery all my data is showing in corrupted files what can I do now; is I am making any mistake kindly anyone tell me

[@Ranblv]

great video. is there a way to put it on a bootable disk drive and run it?

[@Doriandotslash]

Thanks! And yes, you can download the gparted ISO and extract it to a USB stick just like any other distro. There are several utilities in both Linux and Windows to put ISO files onto USB sticks.

[@NitrosS]

this can be done using a live dvd or live usb? Or Should I make a Usb live persistent?

[@Doriandotslash]

You can use live media for this. No need for persistent storage.

[@NitrosS]

@@Doriandotslash yes but it is possible to install software in live usb?

[@Doriandotslash]

@@NitrosS Yes. But if you reboot then that software will be gone.

[@NitrosS]

@@Doriandotslash thank you, I'll keep making my research

[@deciodasilva3960]

I formatted my HDD and installed and another distro on it, I had backed my files but unluckily my files got corrupted for some reason. I'm now in my new distro not much is installed just the basics do you think it's still possible to recover my files...

[@Doriandotslash]

Possibly. But remember that every new file written to the disk has a chance of overwriting where a deleted file is located.

[@eros_devs]

What if i wrote the disk trying to recover is there a way i can recover or make new one that work please

[@xEricC1001x]

Your problem is probably handled or forfeit by now since this comment is old but the answer was "it depends on if the data you wrote overwrote the sectors you were trying to recover"

[@dingaanthatho615]

Hi , what if it wasnt a os partition but just a mount point i had for an external drive

[@dingaanthatho615]

Never mind I wasn't reading, got my steam library back 😁. Thank you !!

[@owenbowen2222]

Would this software work the same for recovering a failed cut and paste operation? If so I will try this tomorrow morning

[@Doriandotslash]

Yes it would.

[@hyuflhyup7368]

will this method work for Kali linux ?🤔👍

[@pn7211]

I want help bro i lost my partions (os booted )

[@arnabbose4682]

Sir during installing ubuntu i have selected entire drive to install ubuntu now i have lost my windows is there any way to recover my windows???

[@Doriandotslash]

You can follow the steps in the video to recover files from NTFS as well. Have a look at the documentation for specifics.

[@30dk09]

wooooow

[@shivam4428]

Do u do kernel development programming?

[@Doriandotslash]

No I don't.

[@DRmechanic10]

I wrote a raspberry img to a 4t drive be mistake is there a way to recover that?

[@Doriandotslash]

Well that depends on how much data was written. You might be able to recover the partition but not all the files if they've been physically overwritten. There a chance though that you could go in and at least recover important documents that survived.

[@alex-vq1yy]

I just change my os to (windows 10 )to (ubuntu linux) and i forgot to backup my local disk D,E and F drive , so is there in any solution for me to recover my windows drive file in ubuntu linux? please tell if u know!

[@Doriandotslash]

The steps in this video should help you out. But it is possible that your data has been overwritten. Best bet is to try running testdisk and cross your fingers!

[@alex-vq1yy]

@@Doriandotslash 🥺🥺🥺😔😔😔

[@milenaradomirovic1020]

Hello, I accidentally deleted data from sdb disk on Linux Debian using sudo dd command. Sdb has 238 GB and I think I deleted ~30 GB. 🙁 My computer is still on, so can I do something using testdisk or something like that instead of using Ubuntu live like in the video?

[@Doriandotslash]

You can try, but you should really run it from a Live iso so you can make changes.

[@milenaradomirovic1020]

@@Doriandotslash Thank you. I think I deleted some windows files. Do you have some advice how I can recover it? In the case I deleted something from boot partition, what should I do?

[@saifullahshekh]

I two-time formated ubuntu can I get data back?

[@Doriandotslash]

Probably not everything, but you may be able to recover some files depending on where they were on the disk.

[@q.u.e.r.t.y]

0:25, that's funny because I'm watching this videos because I want to recover my files that were deleted from the Timeshift directory

[@sambitsaha3608]

Dear Sir, I need your help urgently. I deleted a 32gb ext4 partition with Ubuntu in it from my 240gb SSD with windows 10 already on it. I have used it for a few days, and Im barely using 110 gb of it, so im guessing I havent overwritten anything. Is there any hope for me?

[@Doriandotslash]

Sambit Saha Possibly. It won’t hurt to try and see if anything can be found

[@sambitsaha3608]

@@Doriandotslash Im not really a pro, is it okay if i let the SSD be for a few weeks without touching it? Will the partition still be recoverable?

[@Doriandotslash]

Sambit Saha If you don’t use it it’s fine.

[@sambitsaha3608]

@@Doriandotslash So I just ran testdisk on my Windows partition, and it didnt find the lost partition. What can I do now? Thank you for your time :-)

[@uwiqgfu7epvnsbnld259]

Epic voice

[@cakru]

Can linux recover android reset file?

[@ABOhiccups]

0:27 It's too late! The damage is already done!

[@oneman29]

My 2tb nvme had 4 equal partitions. One with Zorin, one with Windows, one Empty and one with all my backup files. I wanted to reinstall Zorin on its partition, and I must have made a mistake and it formatted the whole drive, made one partition and installed Zorin on it. After that I've logged in, realised what happened and found your tutorial. Unfortunately the quick scan only found the new Zorin files. Let's see if the deep scan finds anything. And any idea what happened in similar situations? I don't even care about windows or Zorin. If my backups where on another part of the disk, 4th partition sector, do you think they can be recovered?

[@darktv5206]

Did you know what have you done?!!! (You made me save my work info that cost near 20k)

[@Doriandotslash]

Glad I could help!

[@xpucm0ca]

Who the hell did not like that video and why?

[@Doriandotslash]

There's always a couple of those people ;)

[@thenextpoetician6328]

Good stuff. Hope I never need to use the tool. Friend switching over to Linux has Windows tools for that. He found 12 TB he could try to recover off a 1 TB drive from eBay.... Yowsers.

[@Doriandotslash]

Yes if you're going to sell a hard drive, it's a good idea to do proper secure wipes beforehand.

[@thenextpoetician6328]

@@Doriandotslash For sure. Buddy was a gamer, fwiw,

[@Placebo6]

Can i kiss you? no. then here is a super like at least... 😘

[@murraybryant6088]

I got a perfect recovery by *Offhackers* via *Instagram* I strongly recommend him to y'all!!

[@matthewlathum9312]

Dear Dorian, would you possibly advise me on how to recover a 3TB external drive, is it possible to use testdisk?

[@xEricC1001x]

He or anyone would need a LOT more info than that. Like was it dropped, does it make a sound, did you try a different cable and power source(so many times the WD plug just fries and another wire will boot the drive fine), what does the computer do when it's connected etc

[@matthewlathum9312]

using TestDisk I recovered some files but the remaining time is so far 1250 h and 54 minutes! TestDisk seems to me very, very fast!