How To Recover Deleted Files From Your Hard Drive

There are many files we delete every day and some files we delete accidentally which then we later need. To make the matter worse after deleting the file you just can’t log into Windows to retrieve the files.

In such situations what you should do? Fortunately we have prepared a guide for you that will allow you to use Ubuntu Live CD to boot into the machine and retrieve your deleted files.

For the purpose of this guide we will be using a Windows XP machine.

Recovering Deleted Files From An NTFS Hard Drive

1. Use either Ubuntu Live CD or Ubuntu 9.10 flash drive to boot into Ubuntu
2. After you have booted into Ubuntu click on application and select accessories > terminal.
3. Now you must select the hard drive from which you need to recover the deleted file so in the terminal window type the following command sudo fdisk –l and press enter.
4. Now you need to look for the line that ends with HPSF/NTFS so in our case it was “/dev/sda1” the sda1 might be different for you but It will begin with /dev/
5. If you have more than one hard drive with NTFS partition then you should recognize your drive by its size which will be written after sda1 field.
6. After discovering the name of your hard drive in Ubuntu now you need to scan it with the following command sudo ntfsundelete <HD name>
7. The name of the files that can be recovered will show up in the far right column. The percentage in the third column will tell you how much the file can be recovered
8. In our test system we deleted two JPGs so to recover the JPG file enter the command in terminal window sudo ntfsundelete <HD name> –u –m *.jpg so in our case it was sudo ntfsundelete /dev/sda1 –u –m *.jpg
9. The recovered files are saved in current working directory which will be the home directory of the current user.
10. You can see the files visually but you cant yet use them because the files are saved as “root” user
11. So you want to save the file as Ubuntu user and to do that type the following command in terminal window sudo chown ubuntu <Files> in file name put the name of the file that you have recovered.
12. Now you can access the file.
13. So after booting into windows you can use the recovered file and back them up

There you go a guide that will help you to recover your deleted files. You can use this guide on a windows 7 machine also but as we wanted to give you an example we used a windows XP machine.

The ntfsundelete option from the Ubuntu is a very powerful and nifty tool that will allow you to recover your files easily. But there are many windows utilities also that can do the same job.

Do let us know if you know any other way with which we can recover the deleted files.