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a a raw partition was deleted from a disk, a new partition & volume was created. a bit of data has been written to the volume already.

Given the above scenario:

1 - is it possible to restore the original partition? 2 - if first option is no longer possible, is it possible to recover data instead of the partition? 3 - what is the best software (free or commercial) for this operation.

N.B the volume created has not been formatted.

thanks and regards.

Vladimir.

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    The 3rd question depends on the data originally in the volume and is very subjective. Please tell us what kind of data was stored on the volume? Filesystem, Oracle Database, something else. The answer to the first 2 questions is 1 - Not if data has been written to the space occupied by the original partition. 2 - You may be able to recover some data depending how much has been overwritten.
    – Rik Schneider
    Commented Mar 15, 2013 at 22:29
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    What do you mean by "volume" in contrast to "partition"? Have you made the partition a PV for LVM? How was the deleted partition used?
    – Hauke Laging
    Commented Mar 15, 2013 at 22:35
  • To Rik Schneider, the king of data to be honest is unknown, the company uses Nice Perform Express to record audio from users ip phones, this system was using a raw file system, therefore the drive was not accessible from explorer (W2K3), we had no knowledge of this until the partition was deleted and the recording stopped, in an attempt to understand the root cause we created a partition & a new volume on the deleted partition, after doing so the system started recording again.
    – Vlad
    Commented Mar 15, 2013 at 23:28
  • To Hauke Laging, a new volume was created on the new partition, but the volume has not been formatted yet, although the system in question is using this new partition/volume to store the audio recording.
    – Vlad
    Commented Mar 15, 2013 at 23:33

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Using an open-source tool called TestDisk can help you either getting the old partition back or just restoring the lost files:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It can run on Linux, Windows, or MacOS.. I've used it many times to get recover deleted partitions and data

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  • hi Minniux, thanks for the suggestion, TestDisk is being used to scan the disk... in case it fails to identify the deleted partition, will the following step make any sense: Delete Newley created Volume & partition will TestDisk be able to identify that two partitions were deleted in the disk structure?
    – Vlad
    Commented Mar 16, 2013 at 9:03
  • No. Doing any changes to the current structure will most likely decrease your chances of getting the partition back. So if the usual scan of TestDisk didn't show the old partition go with their 'Deeper Scan', it'll take lots of time though to finish.
    – minniux
    Commented Mar 16, 2013 at 21:30

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