Well, I was installing OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 and I had “Ext4” partition as my /home. It was aproximately 880 Gbs in a 1 Tb HDD.
During the instalation, I’ve decided to resize my partition to 900 Gb, because I wanted to resize swap from 14 Gb to 2 Gb only.
This operation, not only resized my partition, it changed the file system too from ext4 to xfs (I was using Kubuntu before and I replaced with OpenSUSE…).
I had almost 300 Gb of file such like music, pictures, documents, etc. Today I was moving to another partition and I saw that my files were only 90 Gb, obviously I feel terrible.
I would like to know if there is any kind of solution or program to run in windows or linux, now I am trying to recover data from some windows-based-programs. I have tried two with no success.
Thanks in advance for all your time and consideration.
FYI: The openSUSE installer only does as instructed and would not format a partition unless you expressly permitted such.
All actions are also confirmed before it proceeds
This shows why it is extremely important that you pay attention to ALL install screens understand them and agree to them before proceeding. You are in charge the installer can not read your mind and it only makes recommendation you accept them or change them
Sad, but AFAIK when you re-format you really do wipe all data so everything you’ve lost is irrecoverable.
This is one reason why I generally recommend making partition modifications using gparted live separately and before doing any other operation (like an upgrade or install).
gparted live will do many things like resize and move partitions without data destruction, and you can very clearly see all the steps being authorized… You shouldn’t be surprised by something like a re-format.
BTW - I did an upgrade to LEAP (from 13.2) on a machine with objectives similar to what you wanted.
On this machine, I wanted to completely reformat the root partition while preserving the /home partition (which was formatted with ext4). Probably unlike what you did, I wanted to carefully inspect changes so declined the auto layout (important! and your probable mistake) and opened up the expert option. To my surprise, these steps automatically recognized my /home partition and allowed me to change the root partition to BTRFS, and I was able to further modify the size of the root and swap partitions (but not resize the /home). Satisfied with the final proposal, I accepted and proceeded with the install resulting in exactly what I wanted… a preserved /home while modifying everything else.
Boot “Mini Windows XP” and open “photorec” utility, this utility read ntfs, fat32, and ext2, 3, 4 partititions.
Photorec has the option to scan and recover partitions. In my own case I was recovering from “whole disk”.
1 TB disk is spending approximately 40-50 hrs to recover all the data.
P.S.1- My pictures are 100% ok, even full hd quality (This is more important to me that all my music).
P.S.2- My only issue is with mp3 files, I am trying to play them, I only can read id3 tags but can’t play any sound.
P.S.3- By the way, everything is recovering into different recovery folders and the file name is already different than the original one, this is already assigned by photorec, BUT, the date when my pictures were taken is still there and I can sort my files in the right order just searching and sorting by date.
I was not able to recover all my mp3 and pictures. Most mp3 are missing, and the ones that I have recovered are not complete (part of the song at the beginning is missing).
There is an utility called PhotoRec Sorter, it helps a lot to sort files by extension type, or file name (those without extension).
Now I am trying with “UFS explorer”, just trying luck.
Good luck, Gonzalo. Beyond that I can only suggest that you create a separate partition for your own data (as distinct from your operating systems and applications). If you multiple boot to other operating systems and one of them is Windows, you can create a nfts partition. Also (as others suggested) NEVER choose the automatic formatting option and to be safe, always back up your data to an external optical, magnetic or flash drive or disk.
Since you said you English was not so good (although all that you said was quite understandable), I am going to repeat this in Spanish:
Buenas suerte, Gonzalo. Espero que logras recuperar sus datos. Pero para la siguiente ocasión, le recomiendo crear una partición separada para sus datos y si utiliza windows, que sea en formato ntfs. Ademas, tal como le han recomendado otros, nunca selecciona la opción “partición automática” y siempre respalda sus datos a un disco óptico, magnético o memoria flash externo.
