Recovering formatted partition

Question

I accidentally hit 'format' in qtparted on my ext3 partition (for Ubuntu), which I was analyzing via another computer. The list of four messages it gives during the format process include "writing inode table" and "writing filesystem", or something similar.

How can I view this data? The tools I've looked at appear to either require intact inode tables or, in the case of file carvers, don't preserve directory structure (which may be impossible) and operate on a very limited set of file types. Can this data be recovered? The format operation took so little time that I suspect the data may still be there.

Answer 1

Take a look at the TestDisk utilities. They are designed for exactly this purpose, recovering data when the allocation table is missing/overwritten.

If you haven't used the disk since and it wasn't thoroughly overwritten during the format then there's a high chance you'll get a lot of your data back. Just dont't place any trust in its validity (a recovered file may have data that is wrong or missing, at any location).