Weird Linux Data Recovery situation

[Edvard_Grieg]

Hi guys,

So here's the situation, a friend of mine decided he wanted to play with Linux on his laptop, without really understanding what he was doing he installed Red Hat and by doing so overwrote his Windows files etc. I am 99.99% sure that he did not do anything to create a new partition etc. So as it stands now I have a laptop hard drive with a screwed up version of Linux installed. If I boot into linux from his laptop I have nowhere to really save any recovered data as it is the same disc and partition. As such, I have removed the drive and have it in an enclosure attached to my windows laptop. I tried running R-Linux but it appears to just actually recover the Linux files, not dig past the linux files to the NTFS/FAT32 disk.

Is this a hopeless situation?
What other tools are out there that I can use?


Thanks!!

 

[tdg]

When he installed Linux did he do so over the entire disk or partition off a area of free space? If he didn't the disk is probably now in a native Linux filesystem format and chances are slim of recovering much except for areas of the disks that haven't been overwritten with other files. I've only recovered files from a FAT/NTFS formatted disk and never had to in Linux/UN*X so I'm not aware of software that does it.