GParted says hard drive is "unallocated"

[oldfred]

No idea.

Generally I do not like stopping tasks, but on your drive it is just reading so it may be ok. I doubt that you can then restart where it is. It would just start all over. I think on my system it took over 6 hours for photorec. I really only lost a folder, but it seems to scan entire drive. There is an advanced setting in photorec to just recover certain types of files. It shows file extensions to try to recover. Not any faster as it still scans entire drive.

[Cipher1874]

Alright, well, I stopped it for now. The amount of files was getting to be overwhelming, so hopefully testdisk's deeper search will work.
With that I should be able to search for a specific folder and then find that and its contents, correct?

Also, after the first run stopped because there wasn't enough space and I selected the correct directory, for some reason this one seems to have waaaay less image files than the first run. And most are thumbnails. I only managed to find 2 photos so far. And it looks like videos got converted to tiny .jpegs? Unless those are just the thumbnails, in which case I'm guessing that some of the many .avi files that I can't play are what I'm looking for.

So once the files are in the new location, are they removed from the hard disk?

[oldfred]

I do not think they are removed from hard drive. It is just finding things that look like files & copy to backup location. You may get thumbnails and all the other little support files.

[Cipher1874]

For some reason the files from the first run weren't in the second (or at least not in the first few files of the second) so that's why I was asking.

I really hope testdisk works.

Also, how does that Python script for organizing the files by type work?

[oldfred]

I did not use any of those scripts, I did not know they existed until after I used photorec.

I wrote a one line command and manually updated it each time with every folder & file type. I knew I could convert it, but had not done much bash at the time and was only doing it once (I hoped).

[Cipher1874]

Ah, okay. I guess I'll just sort through it all manually.

Testdisk shows all partitions as deleted again.

[Cipher1874]

Also, I selected "Data" and it said that there was no partition to recover or something and then sent me back to the "analyse" option.

[oldfred]

Are you in MBR or gpt mode. I might try both.

If you undeleted before I do not understand why they are now deleted again, or did you not save the changes?

[Cipher1874]

Okay, things are looking hopeful! Now that the partitions were undeleted, I went ahead and restarted, and now I can see the stuff from my other drive on there (somewhat, not sure if data can be accessed with that). So I went ahead and put in my Win7 ISO, and ran that, and then ran the startup repair which found and fixed a problem. Then it restarted and I tried startup repair again and this time it didn't find anything, though the laptop still can't boot that OS because I'm guessing parts are missing, but now I know I can re-install it pretty simply.

So now how do I get to my files? Hopefully this means that this will be a lot easier than before! (:

[Cipher1874]

xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sda'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2902cc6d

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 411647 204800 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 * 673792 391383039 195354624 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 391383040 925575167 267096064 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4 925575168 976773167 25599000 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Though testdisk once again showed the partitions as deleted, strangely enough, even though the System, Data, OS, and Recovery sections are showing up on my desktop, so I changed them all back to primary. It says that no partition is bootable, though?

Running testdisk again with deeper search for both Intel and EFI/GPT. Also running GParted now with the recovery option.

Edit: And for MBR, since it rewrites itself into the hard disk, how do I go about changing that back if / after it works?

Edit two: I FOUND THE FILES! OS- > Users