Recover Encrypted Partition - Help Needed :S

[Iluvatar101]

Hi

I'm new both to this forum and to foruming (is this a word?) generally so I apologise for putting this here (I'm certain it can't be the right place). If someone knows a better place for this thread please let me know, or better yet if the question has been addressed elsewhere then perhaps someone could point me in the right direction. But perhaps my situation is sufficiently involuted as to be unique.

I'll describe briefly what I've done and then with some luck perhaps someone will be able to offer a little sage advice to help me sort it out.

I decided today that my file system needed a bit of shaking up, primarily so that I could create an extra partition for some dual booting. To this end i dropped all my personal files into an encrypted partition I had on my main disk. This done, I proceeded to repartition the rest of the disk. In a bout of stupidity (and not reading what was in front of me) I accidentlly formatted the entire disk, including the encrypted partition. The entire disk became unalocated.

I should say that I was booted off a usb pen at the time, which is how I was able to wipe the whole hard disk.

After much frantic googling I tried the testdisk utility, which only found one partition on my hard drive. I used test disk to restore this partition. Since I had had more than one partition on there and at least two of the same size and the one I wanted being the encrypted one, I'm not at all confident that testdisk found the correct partition. In an case I was unable to mount this partition using truecrypt.

I then read online that I would need to restore the volume headers and followed instructions to do that, but it made no difference. I hadn't been clever enough to back up the volume headers and was trying to use the copy which truecrypt apparently embeds at the end of the volume.

I've now come to the end of my own capacity to solve this thing and I'm hoping that someone on this forum might know a way I can fix this.

Please ask if there's any important information you need in order to understand the problem better.

Oh, I should say I'm using Fedora, Truecrypt, and that the Hard drive hasnt been active since I'm booted from USB. However I did format the whole thing and then resurect a partition using testdisk so I'm not sure what state the data is in.

Many thanks in advance

Iluvatar101

[Rubberman]

My suspicion is that you are SOL... Before I do stuff like what you did, I ALWAYS back up my data to an external drive, and then remove it from the system before I start munging around with system drives. That said, I've done similarly bone-headed operations in the past, including such as "rm -rf *" when I was in the root directory... Or as Homer Simpson would say, Doh!

[Iluvatar101]

Lol Thanks for the reply. I'm normally a lot more careful with these things. I just clicked the wrong button in my rush. BTW im not sure what SOL means.. I'm guessing sh1t outta luck? and Oh lol.. i just realised what you said about the rm -rf.. did it wipe everything?

Well I'm still investigating.. I installed a hex editor and im looking for the partition boundaries.. trouble is im not really sure what they should look like.. if i could find the boundaries then maybe i could create a partition with them then somehow copy the backup volume header.. but im kinda fumbling in the dark.. If I cant figure it out in couple of days I'll just install over the top of it and cut my losses..

It's frustrating because i had like ten years of stuff on there.. all my old Uni stuff and some crappy software I was coding..

It'll be a lesson learned I guess lol