The partition table describes the division of your disks into partitions. Each partition is formatted into filesystems such as ext4, exFAT, and NTFS before it can be used. When a partition is deleted, only the entry in the partition table is removed while the real filesystem remains intact.
Deleted or lost partition recovery is possible by scanning the disk for existing filesystems and then recreating the partition table based on the found filesystems.
Partition recovery relies on the filesystem remains to uncover the missing partitions. One such application in Linux is testdisk.
Partition recovery tools could only operate on unmounted filesystems. The best way to do it is by using live Linux distribution or installer disk such as the Ubuntu installer.
For Ubuntu installer, click on the Try Ubuntu button.
If no Live CD mode available, press <ctrl> + <alt> + <f2> keys to get to the terminal.
$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT loop0 7:0 0 1.9G 1 loop /rofs loop1 7:1 0 89.3M 1 loop /snap/core/6673 loop2 7:2 0 53.7M 1 loop /snap/core18/941 loop3 7:3 0 151M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-28-1804/31 loop4 7:4 0 4M 1 loop /snap/gnome-calculator/406 loop5 7:5 0 14.8M 1 loop /snap/gnome-characters/254 loop6 7:6 0 1008K 1 loop /snap/gnome-logs/61 loop7 7:7 0 3.7M 1 loop /snap/gnome-system-monitor/77 loop8 7:8 0 35.3M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1198 sda 8:0 0 20G 0 disk sr0 11:0 1 2G 0 rom /cdrom
$ sudo add-apt-repository universe 'universe' distribution component enabled for all sources. ##### snipped
$ sudo apt install --assume-yes testdisk Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: testdisk 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 316 not upgraded. Need to get 345 kB of archives. ##### snipped
$ sudo testdisk
Intel is the most common partition type with EFI GPT starting to gain popularity.
$ sudo reboot
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