Best way to recover a partition from my HDD that I lost when my computer shut down while I was expanding the partition from 800GB to 1TB?
I had two partitions, and I deleted the first partition (NTFS) to expand the second and keep only one partition (EXT4). However, while performing this operation in GParted, my computer shut down, and upon reconnecting the HDD, the partition was no longer there. Can anyone tell me if there is a way to recover this partition? I know about Photorec, but it retrieves files without names, and it’s a huge mess… I would love to recover my files with their respective names.
I tried with "gpart" but it shows 4 partitions that shows as "unknown" and I am not pretty sure this is the best way.
Expanding a partition should not normally result in data loss. It’s also quite fast even for a large partition. But moving the start of a partition, which it sounds like you were doing, will if it’s interrupted. Unfortunately it’s not easy to figure out where it was up to and resume from there. If the new and old position of the partition don’t overlap, then you could just restore the old partition in place by restoring the old partition table, but then you would still need to know where the old partition started (you could try using testdisk to find where the old partition started).
So I guess your options are, if you have the technical knowledge to piece together what I’ve alluded to above and attempt a MacGyver repair, do it. Or, you could reinstall and restore from backups. Or, take it to a data recovery specialist.
testdisk might find the original partitions. Do a deep search and try all the partitions it finds. One of them may have your files.
A manual approach might help/work too. You remake your orignal partitions with a partition tool like gdisk, 2048 is the usual start of partition 1, then try using +200G for the ending. Second starts when first left off, to end. Seems like your partition info is garbage anyway, so I don’t think making a new partition table will hurt. DO NOT make any filesystems or format. With luck, the original second partition is still just sitting there.
And the easiest would be to set up new partitions and restore from backup ;^)