24.04.2 LTS upgrade and data drives

Support and Help
1

Hello all,

I’d been running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for years, and proactively upgraded to 24.04.2 LTS recently, prior to the upcoming EOL date on the previous release. I have a 3TB data drive which I should’ve taken better measures to remove first.

22.04 was installed on a 500GB partition of a separate physical drive which did the job, but must not be quite sufficient enough for 24.04.2, so the installer wiped the entire 3TB drive and put the smaller remaining portion of the OS, on it.

Lessons learned. Anyway, as an aging hobbyist on these things, I recall many years ago when there were on the Windows side, Norton Data Recovery or other tools to try to recover data from reformatted/wiped or even corrupt drives. Does such a thing exist within Linux/Ubuntu now? I have 5 year old backups of that data, but not edits made since 2020 (when Win7 went EOL and I finally moved to Ubuntu as my primary OS).

I must have missed this in the 24.04.2 install GUI when selecting partitions. Not the IPU – that didn’t go well and the previous IPU hosed up my profile ACLs. So I opted for a fresh install. I’ve since poked around with Gparted and /etc/fstab and see that entire drive as mounted but empty except for what the new release put on it.

Thanks for any suggestions :slight_smile:

2

Your description seems that you downloaded a 24.04.2 installer, booted it, and selected “Install Ubuntu.” Formatting the storage device is a typical step when installing a computer operating system.

Advice: Don’t use that storage device for daily use until you have completed recovering all data. Every disk operation may be overwriting your old data.

Advice: Boot your 24.04.2 installer. Choose “Try Ubuntu”. Install either Photorec or Testdisk into the “Try Ubuntu” environment (which runs in RAM). Both are in the Ubuntu Repositories. Use those applications to recover what can be recovered.

It will be tedious and very slow.

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