Severe Data Loss on New Drive! Help!

[Sefy]

If someone manages to help, i will forever be in your debt, here is the situation from beginning:

I got a new 1tb hard drive to replace my old 320gb drive
Installed in the PC, used gparted to create partition table and then the ext4 partition, so far all seemed great
created a mount point for it and started trasnferring files from the old to the new.

I went to sleep during the transfer, when i woke up, i saw a message (after 77gb were said to have been transferred) saying read-only partition.
I went in as root, made sure all files are under my user (sefy) and decided to reboot.

during the reboot, i suddenly get fsck doing a check on my drives and saying it can't even read it! that's its' a zero length partition 
i immediately loaded geparted, and saw that it marked the partition with a warning and you can see the error message on the information

I cannot find a single repair tool, and i don't want to rebuild a partition and loss everything on it, that's 77gb of documents and applications from years!
I have years of documents and applications that were transferred, i can't even begin to imagine to try and find things again on it 

Please tell me there is a way to repair this 

[Was_Just19]

Testdisk and photorec to the rescue I would suggest.

If the new drive was zeroed before you wrote anything to it then I would suggest photorec before testdisk ........  it should recover all the written files to a separate drive.

Hopefully that will be successful.

You could then run testdisk to try to recreate the partition table, and if it succeeds all your files should magically reappear. At which point the recovered files will not be needed.

A bit late now I know, but such moving of data should be, IMO, undertaken by copying, confirming and then deleting the original.
I would go so far as to say to use rsync for the job, as it confirms each file is copied correctly before moving to the next one.
GUIs for rsync -- Grsync and Luckybackup are in the repository.
For future reference .....

Photorec and testdisk should sort you out .......  provided no writes have been made to the drive since the event.
You should be careful when examining the drive --- only mount it ReadOnly to preserve the data.

Aside:
            seems this is the season for such happenings .......  at least the third such data loss reported in the forum lately. So you are not alone   

regards.

[Sefy]

Thanks, i've downloaded PhotoRec (and add it to my future remasters) and i see it says recovering, although it will finish in 21 hours...
I just hope it will get my files back in working order

[Sefy]

Unfortunately neither PhotoRec or TestDisk have been able to do anything useful 
PhotoRec made it look as if it was restoring files, but anything that was restored, had nothing to do with what was lost.
It all looked like thousands of txt files and other files which had nothing to do with my lost data

TestDisk saw the partition, said it was writing new MBR, but the end result after the reboot is the same: drive won't mount and is inaccessible 

[menotu]

Real bummer - I feel for you Sefy.

Have you tried SystemRescueCD ( http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page)

This has some decent tools incorporated on the disk so may be worth giving it a whirl

[uncleV]

It all looked like thousands of txt files and other files which had nothing to do with my lost data

May be look for a while at this thread?
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,75207.msg618035.html#msg618035

The biggest problem with recovering files from borked partitions is they usually don't have their proper file names anymore, as you are seeing with the .html files. If they are intact, they will open and you can view their contents, then rename them back to the original name, or something at least suitable.

Edit: And also here:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,75207.msg618270.html#msg618270

Were it my machine and my data, I'd delete  the new partition, remake the old partition with fdisk, using the same start and end cylinders as the original  partition, then run an e2fsck -f -b <last superblock> /dev/<whatever> on that partition.       ...But then again, I'm a bit nuts.

Grin Grin


Did you try fsck -f?

Be careful with it, read man fsck.

[uncleV]

I got a new 1tb hard drive to replace my old 320gb drive
Installed in the PC, used gparted to create partition table and then the ext4 partition, so far all seemed great
created a mount point for it and started trasnferring files from the old to the new.

Are you sure you clicked "Apply" after you created a mount point?

It looks like something got unfinished with the creation of the new partition.