Well, it looks like my data loss has become limited to only a little bit of really insignificant pr0n.  After the last ditch effort this morning, I’ve found everything I was possibly concerned about.  And none of the fancy-schmancy data recovery software helped me a bit.  In the end it was good ol’ open source freeware that brought it all home.  Windows?  I hardly miss thee.

Woo-hoo!!

I went and bought a new external enclosure yesterday, since mine was acting wierd.  I then deleted the partitions that Ubuntu had created and ran `testdisk` under linux.  It actually found my missing partition!  I then had to run `chkdsk /f` on the drive, and almost all my data came back to me!  I have my homemade videos, pictures, and documents.  I just haven’t found my pr0n.  And I really can’t complain about that, you know?

None of those 23 partitions were useful.  Oddly enough, there were files that I think were really old being listed, but none of my more recent files.  So now I’m trying Data Recovery Wizard.  I don’t know if it’ll work, but I’m not losing much by trying.

I’m so confused.  ARAX Disk Doctor found 23 deleted partitions.  Many of them are 1.40MB, and none of them are ~279GB, which is the one I deleted (most recently, I might add).  Looks like I can scan the deleted partitions and find out what can be recovered inside each one.  So that’ll take another couple of days, I’m sure.

Now it’s found 5 partitions.  I have no idea what it’s finding.

ARAX Disk Doctor has now found 4 partitions on my HDD.  I have no idea what it’s finding at this point, and there’s still 24 hours to go.  I can’t wait to see the results.  I think.

Wow, ARAX Disk Doctor found another partition.  It isn’t giving me any details right now, but I don’t remember having two partitions on that drive.  Maybe it found the full drive partition?  I won’t know for another 30 hours.

ARAX Disk Doctor is going to take almost 60 hours to scan my 300GB HDD.  The good news: It says it already found 1 deleted partition!  Unfortunately, it thinks it found an 80GB partition.  I had the whole HDD in a single partition before.  But, I probably only had ~80GB of data on there.  So I haven’t given up hope yet.

I’ve installed demos of several different disc recovery applications trying to recover my lost data. So far only one, Arax Disk Doctor, has found a deleted partition. It’s still going through its deep scanning, but I have some hope now.