Recover NTFS partition formatted as a Linux Swap Partition

[vickd]

Hello,

I had a working Windows 10 installation with one SSD with the Win10 operating system, and two 1 TB hitachi's on a Windows software raid system. Windows 10 went down. Then I installed Linux mint 21 on it, which unfortunately made the two raid drives Linux swap partitions. I booted once into Linux and found that I had no access to my old data. since then, I have disconnected the drives.

How do I undelete the Linux swap partition to get back my Windows data on the two Hitachi's (or at least one)? I have since disconnected my Hitachis.

In my search, I came across a software called NTFSundelete. How do I use it to get back my old NTFS partitions from the new Linux swap partitions? They contain years of data!! Thank you, Xperts!

 

[APTI]

Lesson learned, only leave the drive you want to install the OS on in the system when installing an OS, any OS. Best of my knowledge you are F^$*ed. if it made your old NTFS into a swap partition, then it will more than likely have been overwritten by now making recovery near impossible for us mortals. However on the lesson learned, you should look at drive assignments when setting up the install, you would have seen what it planned to do and prevented the loss.
So your take away here is be more careful, hard lesson and I sympathize with your loss as I had loss like that too.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

It is rather strange that Mint would format 2TB of space for swap but that probably happened because they're RAID.

I suggest you reconnect the drives, then boot up Mint and run which ever partition manager is available and double verify all 2TB's were reformatted as swap.

It's possible that only a portion of the drives were reformatted, and existing partitions shrinked.

 

[APTI]

It is rather strange that Mint would format 2TB of space for swap but that probably happened because they're RAID.

I suggest you reconnect the drives, then boot up Mint and run which ever partition manager is available and double verify all 2TB's were reformatted as swap.

It's possible that only a portion of the drives were reformatted, and existing partitions shrinked.

if only he can be that lucky

 

[vickd]

Thank you for your inputs. I plan to connect one drive back and see what it did via a partition mgr. Maybe, run NTFSundelete to see if I can even recover files, if not the whole partition. What I forgot to mention was that I was using only 200GB (optimized) on the 1 TB as my NTFS partitions. Will report my success (or lack thereof).

 

[vickd]

Got lucky! Took me 2 hrs, got most of my data back for $20. Used 7-zip Recovery Software Enterprise edition that came on a Windows Boot disk from Amazon. Thanks.