Help! Accidentally installed Manjaro over wrong SSD

Support
1

Hi, I was going to try Manjaro for the first time, but I accidentally installed it on the wrong drive. Do I have any hope of recovering any datat from that drive?

I booted into Manjaro live from a USB stick, then used the installer to install Monjaro on a new drive. At first, it didn’t recognize the portable SSD I had plugged in, so I exited Monjaro, rebooted into Windows, and reformatted the drive. I then rebooted into Monjaro live.

I tried again to install on the new SSD. This time, it recognized the drive, and I started the install, but the whole machine seemed to freeze on 2 percent (creating partitions, I think). I powered off the machine and tried again.

This time, it seemed to work perfectly. Unfortunately, I must have chosen the wrong drive that time, because it installed Manjaro over my internal Windows drive! I booted up once, realized what had happened, then powered off the PC.

Is there any hope I can recover data from that drive? Please help, if possible.

Thank you!

2

Testdisk or professional recovery tools might help to recover some files. ntfs tends to write data from the middle of the partition, ext4 starts writing from the start, so in case your Win partition was not too full there are good chances to save some files.

3

OK, thank you! I will try that. First, I need to figure out how to safely clone the drive for backup. I’m also worried that the install may have used Trim to delete everything very thoroughly… :frowning: