I accidentally overwrote Windows 7.

I’m sure you guys get this a lot, but a few google searches didn’t reveal much of anything. I accidentally overwrote Windows and want to know if there’s any way to recover the files. I mean, it’d be great if I could recover the whole OS, but that seems unlikely.

Thanks in advance.

Are you sure that you overwrote it or is it simply not booting anymore?

Hello Justanothernewuser and welcome to the community!:slight_smile:

I’m afraid (almost) all of your data will be lost.
But it’s worth a try.

First of all don’t boot in the installed openSUSE.
If you do this openSUSE will write more to the disk making the chance of recovery even smaller.

What I would is make a exact copy of your harddisk with dd.
To do this start a LiveCD open a terminal and run this command:

*dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb*

Where sda is your internal harddisk.
You’ll need a external harddisk with at least the size of your internal harddisk.

Be warned this command will wipe out the data of sdb!
In other words it will wipe out your external harddisk!

After you’ve made the backup you can try recovertools on the copy.
I’ve never done this myself but you could try TestDisk - CGSecurity.

One thing I always do before I install/partition/format is make a backup.
I wish you the best of luck with recovering!

Well … Do not follow Edward_Iii’s advice to quickly if

  • you have more than on internal HD …
  • you have an external HD but it is not /dev/sdb
  • You have an external HD but it is smaller than your internal HD

So make sure (double and triple check) you know which is what!

Otherwise the recovery method he suggested is right. You should always try to repare a copy of the damaged disk. But if you did reformat this partition with another filesystem and install Linux on it, chances are that it’s all gone. We can just hope that you applied a setup which installed Linux in another partition and that your Windows is just not booting anymore. If it’s the case, that would be easy to fix.

How did you overwrite the Windows OS?

  1. Deleted Partition and haven’t gone any further than this? You may be able to recover using a disk recovery software to re-create the partition table, then use the windows recover console to repare the boot loader.
  2. Deleted Partition as part of a Linux (any distro/ any version) install but didn’t put anything into the old window partition or format that partition? See 1) above but success will be limited by many factors.
  3. Deleted Partition as part of a Linux install, re-made partitions and installed Linux over some or all parttiions? Then your SOL because the information that was on the partition not only has the partition description gone, but it also has been written with block identifiers and zero’d blocks then required files to be installed were written into the blocks as needed.
  4. Deleted Partition as part of a Windows re-install? Then you are definately SOL. Windows gives no choice once you commit to install even if you abort through a power down, there is a 90% chance that all is lost. For the remaining 10% chance, you will need track/sector analysis software and an alternate drive to try to reconstruct data patterns.

Partition Deletion and Overwrites pose the most common error made during any OS install as opposed to partition or track/sector failures where ‘Search and Recover’ or similar tools can recover by scanning for a valid directory or filesystem structure.

I hear all the time from people that didn’t appreciate the importance of always back-up important data before attempting even the minorist of change to partitions or filesystems. Even the most experienced people can encounter both human error mistakes and software glitch or hardware glitch mistakes that can damage the Partitions structure and integrity.

Justanothernewuser wrote:
> accidentally overwrote Windows and want to know if there’s any way
> to recover the files.
>

easiest is to restore from backup…


DenverD
When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [posted via NNTP w/openSUSE 10.3]

On 2010-10-22 13:36, techwiz03 wrote:

> I hear all the time from people that didn’t appreciate the importance
> of always back-up important data before attempting even the minorist of
> change to partitions or filesystems. Even the most experienced people
> can encounter both human error mistakes and software glitch or hardware
> glitch mistakes that can damage the Partitions structure and integrity.

Absolutely :-}


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

As someone who has had to do recovery , this is NOT a good first approach! If he makes an error typing he can end up with everything damaged.

Could you post your partition table? Maybe you only deleted the partition? This could be recovered quite easily. When the data is really overwritten it would be almost impossible to recover it. But who knows :wink: However, we need more details to help.

Or maybe it just does not appear in the boot menu??? That is easy to fix. But we need more info.

I agree with the more info point. From a liveCD can you run the command fdisk -l ( that is a lower case L) and post the output here,
Or from that liveCD run a GUI partitioning tool (gparted or the yast partitioner for example) and post a link to a screen shot of the partition layout ?

Hi,

I am sorry to say but the last and least condition of any data recovery software is only that there should not be any over-written condition else data could not be retrieved, so you can not get back your windows 7 back, second thing is that no operating system can be recovered by any third party data recovery software. You can only reinstall the operating system!

Thanks

At this stage, we don’t even know what is still acceptable on the disk, we can have no idea what has been lost !!!

(accessible is the word that eluded me)

dvhenry wrote:
> At this stage, we don’t even know what is still acceptable on the disk,
> we can have no idea what has been lost !!!

what we do know is that the OP has written exactly one post to our
forum…and (so far) has not come back to so much as say “Thank you
for the answers.”

nope, his one posts is here as long as this forum is here–a testament
to his inability to successfully install without “accidentally” over
writing his (apparently) important pre-existing system…

i guess it is ok because there ere thousands of similar post out there
saying: Windows killed my previously smooth running Linux…


DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [posted via NNTP w/openSUSE 10.3]

You just got lucky - your Windows is gone :)) - j/k