Data Recovery - ChromiumOS reformats drive

Question

System: EeePc 1015pem hard drive size: 320 GB

Before Chromium install:

1 recovery partition - Windows 7 starter.

1 NTFS for Windows 7.

1 EFI partition for boot booster.

The remaining drive, converted into extended --> 1 NTFS + 1 ext4 + 1 swap

I was trying out chrome in a pen drive. When selected Upgrade in the shell, it wiped my whole 320GB drive and created two large partitions and many smaller ones.

Running TestDisk:

Disk /dev/sda - 320 GB / 298 GiB - CHS 38914 255 63

      Partition               Start        End    Size in sectors

 P HPFS - NTFS              0  32 33 13054  75 13  209715200

 D FAT16 <32M              15 140 62    17 151  6      32768 <-- chromium created

 D Linux                   17 151  7 38390 250  4  616468480 <-- chromium created

 P HPFS - NTFS          15012 107  8 38910 152 26  383924224

 D Linux Swap           38589 184 60 38718 252 46    2076656 <-- chromium created

 D Linux                38652  16 21 38760 108  4    1740800 [C-ROOT] <-- chromium created

Choosing to list files says, "Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged. "

Is it still possible to recover? How?

Answer 1

If you have access to another PC, you could install Ubuntu (or similar) to the USB stick, and boot from that. It would auto-mount the NTFS partitions, and you could see if any data could be recovered, which is very likely at this point, since the partitions are there to begin with.

After recovering your data, you could do a Windows recovery, or if not possible, try manually recovering by deleting non-Windows partitions and restoring the boot loader.

If that doesn't work, you might need to try using something like TestDisk, but I suggest trying the above first.