Hasuppa
April 29th, 2012, 12:25 AM
Dear Installation & Upgrades Board
A couple of days ago when Precise came out I tried to perform an upgrade from Oneiric to Precise by booting from a Precise install disk and selecting "upgrade" in the installation GUI. A little later I was informed by a message prompt that the installer could not detect a swap partition and that therefore I could either proceed without a swap partition, or go back and select one via the partitioning tool. I did the latter and designated my existing swap partition as the swap partition to be used (partition layout: 40GB ext3 for /, 4GB swap and 955GB for /home). At no point was I prompted to confirm whether I wanted to format any partition.
Later during what I had until then believed was the upgrade process I was asked to set up a user account. I already got the sense something was seriously wrong here, but I set up an account using the same name, password etc. as my old account, figuring that since the installation was already under way there was nothing I could do to save my data at this point.
Anyway my worst fears came true and I am left with a fresh install of Ubuntu Precise and 750GB of lost data in my home directory, a small part of which I did not back up. My question, then, is how to recover as much of this data as possible? It's a 5,25 HDD and all other computers I can get my hands on are all laptops, although I do have a spare casing that I could use to turn the HDD into an external USB 2.0 hard drive. I would, however, prefer a method that doesn't require me to use a second computer in the process.
39
A couple of days ago when Precise came out I tried to perform an upgrade from Oneiric to Precise by booting from a Precise install disk and selecting "upgrade" in the installation GUI. A little later I was informed by a message prompt that the installer could not detect a swap partition and that therefore I could either proceed without a swap partition, or go back and select one via the partitioning tool. I did the latter and designated my existing swap partition as the swap partition to be used (partition layout: 40GB ext3 for /, 4GB swap and 955GB for /home). At no point was I prompted to confirm whether I wanted to format any partition.
Later during what I had until then believed was the upgrade process I was asked to set up a user account. I already got the sense something was seriously wrong here, but I set up an account using the same name, password etc. as my old account, figuring that since the installation was already under way there was nothing I could do to save my data at this point.
Anyway my worst fears came true and I am left with a fresh install of Ubuntu Precise and 750GB of lost data in my home directory, a small part of which I did not back up. My question, then, is how to recover as much of this data as possible? It's a 5,25 HDD and all other computers I can get my hands on are all laptops, although I do have a spare casing that I could use to turn the HDD into an external USB 2.0 hard drive. I would, however, prefer a method that doesn't require me to use a second computer in the process.
39