How to Approach Data Recovery from a Corrupted EXT4 Partition: A Personal Journey
Recovering Data from a corrupted EXT4 partition can be an overwhelming and frustrating experience, especially when the data is critical. Recently, I encountered this issue myself and wanted to share my challenges and insights in hopes of helping others facing similar situations.
The Scenario
I was dual-booting my SSD (Crucial CT250MX500SSD1) between Linux and Windows when I accidentally erased my Linux partition during a Windows reinstall. To rectify the situation, I booted from a GParted live USB and successfully revived the partition using TestDisk. However, the partition was left in a “somewhat corrupted” state—though I couldn’t mount it, several recovery tools managed to display the content, albeit with limitations.
One tool, DMDE, offered a glimpse into the full folder structure, but limitations on the free version meant I could only recover a file at a time. In my quest for alternative Software, I mistakenly used a different recovery tool. Although it warned me of the potential data loss if I exited the program, I assumed it was merely a tactic to keep me engaged. Unfortunately, upon quitting, the partition became entirely unreadable, showing nothing but chaos—akin to the random output of /dev/urandom, with only a segment from the 512th to the 4095th byte filled with zeros.
Questions on Recovery Feasibility
At this juncture, I turned to the community for assistance, pondering several questions:
- What are the odds of recovering my data based on your experiences?
- Is it feasible to Recover Data if the partition content is potentially shifted by 1 to 7 bits? If so:
- Are there any existing programs that could brute-force all possible combinations of data until something recognizable is found, even if it takes a considerable amount of time?
- If such Software is not available, could I attempt to create a Python script that reads the partition in binary, trying various combinations of bit shifts or similar methods?
- Are there alternative solutions that I may have overlooked?
A Closer Look at Recovery Techniques
To understand my situation more deeply, I used the dd command to create a file representation of the partition, opting for a block size of 512 bytes. This decision had me questioning its utility since the EXT4 partition was likely created with a default block
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