installed on wrong windows HDD, need to recover the files!!

1st Official Post

    Hi,

    I messed up, I accidentally installed LibreElec on the wrong HDD.

    The HDD was formatted for windows.

    The HDD contains 2 TB of files collected over 10 Years, I cant loose them.

    I need more information on how LibreElec installed and changed the file system on the HDD.

    What is the best action right now to recover my files?

    Running a recovery program in windows right now, but as LibreElec is Linux, I dont know if I should recover in Linux or not?

    Thankful for all the help I can get.

    Edited once, last by Tenmon (May 5, 2018 at 5:47 PM).

    Will this help? The HDD was formatted for Windows before, so it was cleaned and changed to ext4 after the LiveElec installation, right?

    Thanks in advance!

    • Official Post

    LE has installed syslinux bootloader and created two ext4 partitions in a GPT scheme; first is 512MB and the second fills the remaining available space on the drive. The good news is that LE is small and so regardless of where the new partition boundaries have been drawn on the drive we've only overwritten ~235MB of the first (boot) partition space and no more than 20MB on the second (storage) space if it's just a clean LE/Kodi install. The overwritten data is probably only Windows OS files so someone who knows how to perform data recovery should be able to find and retrieve a large amount.

    ** If you don't fully know what you're doing and the data is valuable, stop immediately and seek professional help **