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I had Windows on my hard drive and with tons of data on that. Windows got corrupted and all tried failed to repair it and in absence of windows media I tried installing Linux but by accident it got formatted and Linux got ready. I thought it will create a different partition where it it will keep the windows partition unchanged. Post format I don't see my personal data.

Let me know how I can restore and recover my data.

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    You recover from backups. Which is something that you ought to do before attempting to do any operations of this sort.
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented Dec 13, 2015 at 8:15
  • I guess your best bet is to do a 'deeper scan' using TestDisk and salvage as much data as possible.
    – Vinayak
    Commented Dec 13, 2015 at 9:15

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Short answer: it might not be possible. Formatting a disk (or rather creating a filesystem) will write around the disk and break the previous filesystem. Installing a new operating system will write a lot of data on top of the previous one.

All of this makes it very hard to get any data back. You can try with data recovery tools, they might find fragments of filesystem data and might not care that there is a different filesystem on the disk right now. But don't get your hopes up because depending on how much data was written it might have corrupted blocks from here and there in many files.

Unless you have backups (which I assume you don't, since asking about this) it will be slow, painful and maybe expensive operation involving professional data recovery companies.

But do not operate the Linux installation on the disk. Every time you use it more data will be destroyed.

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if you have formatted your hard drive chances are that some data might have been lost forever (although it is not possible to quantify the loss prior to the drive analysis). However, since a format in general is a simple re-write of a partition table you might be able to recover data contained in sectors where nothing has been written on. To do so, you should use tools like GetDataBack or any other similar ones. These tools perform a low level analysis of your hard drive and try to re-build any previous file system present on the disk. Once the analysis has finished, these tools might be able to label the file systems they have found as recoverable or not recoverable. It is important, as I have stated at the beginning of this message, that you DO NOT USE your computer in any way since DOING SO would mean WRITING MORE DATA IN SECTORS THAT YOU MIGHT WANT TO RECOVER.

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    Format is far from a "simple re-write of a partition table." Creating a file system will alter several parts of the disk and destroy a lot of important information. And especially after a whole OS has been installed, it's quite far from a chance that "some data" is lost. A lot of data is lost forever and the rest is very hard to get back.
    – Sami Kuhmonen
    Commented Dec 13, 2015 at 7:59

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