Help: Installing Linux Mint on USB, destroyed main system drive

[SJB]

OK

It seems like I really stuffed up tonight. I just played around with installing Linux Mint onto a USB stick, but it appears as if it has destroyed my hard drive partitions.....

I have done it so many times before, the installer seemed Idiot-proof the previous 8-10 times I have done it before, however, this time around, it did not ask to confirm which drive to install to, and just proposed the configuration of the recommended partitions.

When I selected back, to select the option to create my own partitions, my USB did not even feature. Selecting and back and back to restart everything, I had to close the installer by left clicking on the task bar and closing it....

Running Gparted confirmed something is wrong..

Trying to restart, confirm that the partition tables were overwritten, seems like everything is gone



Google told me that others have done similar (stupid) things, but gave up and just installed all again on the hard drives.

Now for the question of hope:
1) Is there any chance of getting my information and system back, all did it join the big data warehouse in the sky?
2) If yes, any suggestions to get it back? I have already tried Gparted's "Attempt Data Rescue" as well as Testdisk, but neither of them found anything to recover

 

[KleinBoontjie]

LOL, happened a few times to me too. Luckily not my main drive. I have this 2TB external, that I almost never plug in, only to backup stuff. Funny enough, it's always plugged in when I decide to make a new Linux usb.
I used recovery software to get everything back. Not sure the name of the software now, will let you know when I'm home again. Though, it won't bring back your boot partition.

I actually fixed it once with gparted, think it worked because I stopped it within a few seconds. Just deleted the linux partition and my NTFS partition popped back (bottom one on that pic)

 

[redarrow]

If only the partitions where deleted and not any of the data they contain then it should always be possible to recover, however if testdisk isn't finding anything then I'm not sure what to suggest..

I once wiped my disks partitions and recovered them by using fdisk and recreating them exactly as they were, that only worked though cos I remembered exactly how large each partition had been and in what order they were, luckily I didn't need to remember the precise start/end sectors as by recreating them the same sizes and in the same order fdisk naturally got that right. I guess this wouldn't work if you had manually fiddled with the sectors when creating the layout and couldn't remember them.

 

[ponder]

Try testdisk to recover you partitions.