The hard drive was failing badly and would no longer boot. I've done what you are trying to accomplish (somoene else's PC) for a PC with Windows XP (NTFS). Photorec will show how many files it has recovered.I just read your post and thought I'd reply. Select the path where the recovered files will be stored. Select a directory for the recovered files Select Free if you didn’t write to that partition after removing the particular file, otherwise select Whole.

Otherwise if you are recovering files from a partition formatted as FAT or NTFS select Other. If you are using Linux, it's going to be ext2/ext3/ext4, so the default selection is ext2/ext3. Move the selector up or down to the partition from which you have removed the file(s). Under normal circumstances you don’t need to modify them. Photorec also has a list of different options. For Perl you can select pl for Perl script or pm for Perl module. Here you can disable all file types by pressing s. If your hard disk has Linux partitions, then select. Open a terminal and launch photorec (as root).

Install TestDisk from the Ubuntu Software Center. Recover files based on filetype using PhotoRec PhotoRec tries to recover the filename in this case, but most of the time PhotoRec can't recover the filenames. In some cases, the filename is stored in the file itself. PhotoRec can selectively recover files based on their filetype(s), but PhotoRec / TestDisk can't selectively scan an individual directory for lost files unless you had mounted a whole hard drive partition as this directory. If you're not done after running TestDisk, you can try recovering the deleted files using PhotoRec. If you recovered most of the deleted files with TestDisk, you can decide whether you're done or not. So use TestDisk first, and if you recovered all of the deleted files with TestDisk, then you're done. If you accidentally reformat a partition, TestDisk can recover thousands of files without missing a single file, but if you deleted a file by sending it to the Trash and then emptying the Trash, TestDisk can't always recover it. The problem with TestDisk is that it doesn't always recover all deleted files. TestDisk is a lot more efficient than PhotoRec. What are the main differences between TestDisk and PhotoRec? by installing PhotoRec and TestDisk, some deleted files will be overwritten by the applications that you're going to install if you continue!) If you cannot, know that by each and every single byte you write to your disk right now, one byte of one of your deleted files will be overwritten! (i.e.If you cannot, boot from a Live-USB/DVD before you begin.It's always a good idea to work from a copy of your deleted data, so copy your entire disk before you begin.

Photorec testdisk ubuntu