Long story here, gonna make it as short as possible, and still give you what you need. For years I have always kept my 'home" folders on a different partition ie.....C😃rive, Home (Shared folders) Linux distro. Even if I was just using windows at the time, I still had the separate partition, just in case windows went nuts, as it's known to do.
So a couple of weeks ago, my computer crashed, I had only been running W10, but refuse to go to 11. So I was reinstalling Linux. I ended up trying 7 or 8 distro's before finding one I liked. That and any thing derived from Ubuntu/Debian, would not boot on restart. Tried for a while, never was able to find what would fix it. A few days ago, I decided to try Solus, it kept telling me it could not find the EFI bootloader partition, there wasn't enough room on the one. So I sat up a secondary, that would not register as existing. So I combined the two. Now it kept telling me that 6 gig wasn't big enough. I ended up making it an 11 gig partition, just to have enough room. Crazy I know, but not my problem, yet. So in doing all that creating and resizing, I managed to move the C: drive a little bit. So that ruined a brand new fresh install of W10. The problem there is by the time I moved that, I had logged into Ws, and put Solus, on my flash drive instead of W. I was not happy, I had gotten flustered, I was not able to fix the Ws, install as I no longer had the install drive. That's OK, I was planning on removing windows before long anyway.
But at some point and I don''t even know when it happened, my "Home" folder partition, and a second partition that I use to stage backups, both were over written by making the entire drive, one partition. I would save my backups, and "copy to" duplicate folders on that partition, then copy them to an external, this way if needed the backups were already on my pc. It also gave me two copies, of everything.
Anyway, I said long story. But now I'm sitting here, partitions 8 and 9 have been overwritten, they are still listed as unassigned, or whatever you want to call it, when everything was just deleted, I have not made another partition on top of it yet, so there should be a good chance of recovering everything. Except I can not find a program to recover lost files that works under Linux, except for gparted. And it searches sda1 to sda3, but refuses to scan the unassigned area.. Does anyone know of a at least decent deleted file scanner. I'm not real good with the CLI, but I'm learning. I will appreciate any guidance and advice I can get.
