Data Recovery: When Your OS Deletes Itself - Part I

About two weeks ago, not more than a few days after the end of my Junior year of college, I decided that it was time to do something with my laptop.  My installation of Windows XP Pro was starting to get sluggish and being the impatient type that I can sometimes be; it was beginning to get on my nerves.  (some, including myself, would call this the Windows half-life effect).  Fortunately for me, a shiny new distribution of Ubuntu had just been released a few weeks prior.  Thinking back to the many times I had tried and hated Ubuntu in the past, it only seemed natural that I should download Ubuntu 8.04 and continue to be disappointed.

I downloaded the Kubuntu 8.04 image (I wanted to try KDE 4.0), and got everything installed; I must say that at first, I was impressed.  The speed that I was hoping for was present, everything looked nice and I was able to connect to my wireless network without jumping through hoops (always a plus).  As I sat there on my bed sorting through the OS, the thought even crossed my mind that maybe one day in the near future, I could simply erase Windows and never look back.  Little did I know that my fancy new Kubuntu installation was harboring the same deviant thoughts.

I continued playing with Kubuntu long into the night.  In fact, as I look back at the system logs, it would seem that I was awake until almost 4AM.  KDE 4 was really gripping my attention.  More importantly, I was trying to determine whether or not I could install some of my favorite MS Office tools into Kubuntu, seeing as I hate Open Office.  From what I remember, at about 3:20AM, my system started to become a bit unstable.  By about 3:30AM, everything had basically locked up.  I did an emergency shut down and went to bed.  The next morning, I awoke to find that my entire hard drive had been deleted…file by file.  While I have had a decent amount of experience with Linux, I still do not know how this happened.  My only guess is that I inadvertently interrupted Kubuntu during some sort of data writing process when I preformed my shutdown and caused it to corrupt everything.  Moral of the story…don’t interrupt Kubuntu, it may feel offended and seek vengeance upon itself and everything around it.

In all seriousness, I was and still am pretty distressed.  As I stated, the entire drive was trashed.  This meant that any personal files, school files, etc were gone.  Interestingly enough, I had just completed a semester long course in information forensics, part of which taught data recovery.  Lucky for me…right?  Well, maybe.  Check out Part II for the scoop on how I attempted to recover my freshly trashed drive!

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