can i recover my files?

[pretentious]

i'm writing this on my phone because i've almost tolally wiped my hdd. I don't really know what i did. I tried to format my flash drive but got some random error message from the application i was using so i figured i'd jump on the terminal and rm -rf * walked away for a while and when i came back. My computer was basically crashed. whatever i did, be it the formatting or the deleting, i've now got 3 once bootable partitions, that are empty, though another one that was just for general storage was left alone. Anyway, i'm wondering if it's realistic to expect to be able to recover any of my files. I'm getting close to my uni exams, and luckely i didn't delete the stuff on my flash drive because that had all my work ironiclly, though there are some files i was working on that i'd love to get back. I'm avoiding installing yet an other os to avoid overwriting anything

[0phidian]

I dont know what kind of resources you have at your disposal, but If you can boot from a linux live cd/flashdrive you can install some data recovery software on the live os, which will all be in memory, so nothing should be written to the disk.

I dont personally have that much experience with data recovery but you can try this
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
It should be in the repositories of most linux distros

Hope this helps.

[hellow533]

Do you know if you actually corrupted the hard drive?

Depending on what actually happened, you can try rebooting, f8, start in safe mode with cmd, start, rstrui.exe for system restore, restore to a previous date.

That's assuming you're on windows of course.

[0phidian]

Do you know if you actually corrupted the hard drive?

Thats a good question. You said you had 3 bootable partitions, so you may have just wiped the one with the bootloader on it. In which case the other partions and your files on them should be fine.
So after you try to recover your files from the partition in which you ran the command. Reinstall the OS on that partition and it should install a bootloader with it. Then from the bootloader you can boot to the other partitions, if they were uneffected.

[pretentious]

I decided to just install my new os in the old windows partition sinse i almost never used it. I have backups of some of it so i'm not terribly heart broken. When i have time i'll take a look at the other partitions and do some experimentation.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
It should be in the repositories of most linux distros

Found that on my backtrack cd, and i realized partitions, file systems and mounting and all that isn't something i'm familiar enough with to mess around with, that was about when i installed a fresh os

Do you know if you actually corrupted the hard drive?

i can access all the file systems like i normally would, they're just empty