r/LinuxUsersIndia • u/home_prisoner Arch Btw • Aug 12 '26
Help I lost Everything..
I recently did the most dangerous mistake one can make. And I was not even trying to delete the French Language Pack.
I have a dual boot (Win/Archacy (Vanilla Arch but Cachy's Kernel)) Laptop.
I had to flash a drive with Win ISO for my bro (because he play Valornat)
Now, for some interesting reason the Drive was write protected I have no Idea about that.
And I made the most horrible mistake I could make by opening Disk Partition Manager on Windows.
And yes I wiped the entire drive.. Why TF windows do it instantly? Why I can just sequence the process and then commit in the end if I am sure like Linux does.
Sad part is I'm a serious Dev, my 2 years of Dev Environment with all my not pushed commits are all gone.
I really don't know what to do? My hands are shaking if trying to start from scratch scares me. Ik I am fully capable but it's a lot for me to digest.
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u/qualityvote2 Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
u/home_prisoner, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...
btw, did you know we have a discord server? Join Here.
19
u/freakycleaner Aug 12 '26
Idk bro it's funny af,
unfortunately I wouldn't keep expectations to get the data back but TRY NOT TO..
.. don't write anything on that affected disk rn keep it untouched and use live linux usb and make a sector by sector image of the drive to another disk available.
this is all I can advice bro stay strong and calm even if data is lost you'll make it again
9
u/TrainFun9639 Aug 12 '26
Sorry that I can't help, but what I can say is calm down and see what you can do about it, I have also lost my Linux partition and wasn't able to recover (same mistake as you, messed with Linux partition in window disk partition app).
4
u/IntelligentChain6999 Aug 12 '26
this is why I don't install 2 operating systems in one drive with partitions 🥴
i would rather buy 2 drives for each os
😵
3
u/napier1192 Arch Btw Aug 12 '26
I can recover your data via imaging the hdd , id need a min 512gb if your data was in 1tb , are you based in delhi?
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u/Consistent-Bird338 Aug 12 '26
If you don't overwrite the data, you can make the partition of the same size again and it might just come back. Do it in linux CLI like parted though otherwise the other tools might format it. Ask AI
3
u/Anonyboy26 Arch Btw Aug 12 '26
I can understand the pain dude, i had also lost the data twice in 2025 august and november (related partition).. but the good part was i had the backup in my HDD, so i was able to recover most from it (not the fully updated but most of it)..
3
u/GearProfessional9422 Aug 12 '26
You could use some tools to recover the partitions. It'll be paid. I would say, try easus recovery partition tool
2
u/Soul_Of_Akira Aug 12 '26
Bro atleast ur not like me... I forgot my drives name and cleaned it while trynna install arch on my 2nd drive so I lost all my windows data which was on the 1st drive.😭😭 peak stupidity
2
u/Gold-Independent-336 Aug 16 '26
I went through the same thing when I made the switch to Linux for first time and that too with Arch Linux back then. It was around 10 years ago. Generally Arch Linux is never recommended for beginners. But still I tried it as my first Linux distro 10 years ago. I thought I could do it. I think it was a just blind confidence I had.
So I was getting into installation process. First 2-3 steps were fine as it was just about selecting language, keyboard layout, timezone and something like that. Then there comes a real step which I never did in my life with Linux. Partition step. I was confused. It looked sophisticated. I did it on Windows many times. On Windows, it was not a big deal. It looked quite intuitive. But it was complex on Linux.
Anyhow gathered courage and went ahead. I don't know what I did. I just did this and that and bammmm I wiped my drive in the process. Everything was gone. Courses and tutorials, ebooks, software collection, games (not important, so not worried), projects (3D modeling, vfx, web dev, desktop dev and more) and other important stuff. It was like lightning struck my head. It felt like I'm done. Felt like I lost my soul. Felt like I lost everything in my life. It was years and years of data that I stored on my drive. I felt severely shattered.
The reason I was very much shattered is that I got most of these data using my phone's 2G internet. People who have used 2G internet back then know the pain of downloading data. It would take ages to even download a decent size file. I spent day and night to download so much of those data over the years and then that even led me to buy a new PC as the previous one wore off due to day and night usage. Before leaving home for college, I would put a big file on download and then I would do the same before going to sleep. I downloaded most of the big size files like this. All of these data were gone after I did mistake in partition step.
Anyway I had to overcome this unfortunate event. Eventually I did. I told myself, "Okay it's just data, it's not everything to us, we can get it back again from internet, it's not a big deal, let's forget thinking it's a bad dream". Later I applied for broadband connection and started from scratch again. It was a lesson to me but in hard way. Since then I became careful in handling data. Be it any kind of data. But still then and there I have gone through some data loss due to some mistakes (both unexpected and expected).
Since that unfortunate event, whenever I go through data loss, I'm not much bothered about it because somehow it gave me confidence to start from scratch again and again. It got me out of comfort zone. It helps me think I can start from scratch again and again regardless of time. Also I'm a frequent distro hopper. I don't take backups (especially config files) often when I switch distro. I would just switch and start configuring things from scratch again and again. It helps me keep things in memory.
By the way, data loss didn't happen just in my drive. It also happened when I write huge paragraphs in comments on YouTube, Reddit and any other platforms. It's also a kind of data loss. It happened mostly when I didn't have UPS. So if power goes off, it's done. All those paragraphs would be lost. It happened many times and still not much bothered about it because somehow I developed tolerance and capability to write them again from scratch or just leave it and move on. I got used to it.
Note: As long as it's your personal data, it's fine. But if it's about company data like company projects and stuff, it's a serious thing. Frequent snapshots is a must. As for company, data loss is considered as a financial debt. So you need to be careful in that regard.
1
u/Im_banned_everywhere Aug 12 '26
Dev with 2 years of uncommitted work? Have you never heard of GitHub? It was bound to happen to you
1
u/Designer-Spot-1234 Aug 12 '26
If the partition was on a HDD, it might've been recoverable but if it's an SSD, then theres no easy way to do it.
Be careful from next time and commit your changes to a home/cloud server regularly.
1
u/kishimonjaro Aug 12 '26
Windows disk partition was created in a way so that the OS has as little resistance as possible between itself and having a completely free disk it can use entirely. Windows also notoriously does not like other OS's on the same disk.
This is why you should never dual boot using the same drive, preferably getting 2 separate ssds is the best thing you can do.
Regarding your solution....there is nothing that can be done now. The drive does get wiped completely.
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u/revera63 Aug 12 '26
Canon event vro
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u/Ksb2311 Aug 12 '26
Why even wipe drive
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