I had a very unpleasant (to say the least ) event : by mistake I formatted the harddrive with my mp3 and flac files which was in D-link DNS-323).

I've inserted the second drive, but by mistake I formatted harddrive that already was there. So that it just essentially did the exact same partitioning which it was, but obviously all the files and directories are gone.

I scan it with one of the "undelete" tools and discovered a lot of files, but obviously the original names and directories are gone.

Is there any sophisticated way to restore original directories tree, considering the fact that it formatted/partitioned the drive exactly as it was before ?

Any help will be appreciated. I spent many monyhs digitalizing my CDs and I don't want to repeat the process.

Anybody had similar experience and can recommend any tools Windos or Ubuntu ( I have dual boot - Win7 / Ubuntu on my laptop and XP / Ubuntu on my desktop)

Thanks in advance

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So you had just one drive on your NAS? And then you inserted a new one and formatted the old one?

Did you use that "undelete" app to scan directly the NAS? Or did you remove the drive and scan it?

That's correct. Essentially it formated it to the same partition structure.

I removed drive immediately and used couple of undelete applications which "discovered" a lot of files, but as I mentioned
it's just individual files with no meaningful names at all. Is it some how possible to resotre at least partually the old directory tree ?
I didn't do any operations after I formatted the drive.

Thanks for any advices

Do you know how to work with an hex editor?
If so, open up the drive and check what File System is it.
That will be your first step.

Hi !

I know this already : it's formatted as ext2 and it was ext2 as well.

Do you mean some other things to check, when you mentioned hex editor.
I have no problem to use it if necesasary

Thanks for your help

So use a software that supports Ext2 to scan your drive and check the results to see you can get a structure.

like R-Studio for example, download the demo and try

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

Einstein and Dmarques

Thanks for pointing out on R-studio.
I'll try it today evening

Regards