I'm working on a hard drive that has been partially reformatted to ext2.
The partitions show up in most programs as being two linux partitions and one SWAP partition.

The fact of the matter is the partition table was overwritten with the new ext2 table.

This drive originally had two NTFS partitions, and two DELL fat partitions.
Using testdisk (Cristophe Grenier
s program). I was able to "see" the original file tree including the folders and files within each NTFS partition. But there are some very important folders missing!

It shows C: drive like this:

DELL <dir>
f54jjfd <dir>
boot.ini
AUTOEXE.BAT

So the Windows and Program Files and Documents and Settings folders are missing. Is there ANY way to recover them at this point-+
-

Allthough testdisk could be able to regain the partitions, it most problably
wont get your (perhaps overwritten) data back.

Best solution in my opinion is Get Data Back NTFS
besides R-Studio (as 2nd choice).

With both software tools you need to connect the drive (with your valuabel
data) to another computer where you can install the software pacakges and
use them.
- connect your drive internally to this pc - NOT with USB (bottleneck for data transfer)
- have enough space available on the hdd of the PC - to copy your data from
your source drive

But you may not expect data back which was overwritten !!!

+++

I think, that R-Studio and scan for known file types is the last resort for the case.

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R-Studio Data Recovery Software