I need some help please. I have a 4TB hard drive which was formatted as NFTS, and I wanted to change it to BTRFS. What I did was go in KDE Partition Manager, shrink the volume and change the file system of the unallocated space to BTFRS.
During the procedure, something got stuck and I had to restart my PC. Now, I see this picture here and I am worried my data has gotten cancelled. I would like to know if this means the data got cancelled? If someone can help me find a way to find the commands that have ran and the output, I will be glad to show the results.
Shrink and reformat is risky because it is an intensive action that can stress old drive into failure. You should start with one of the many S.M.A.R.T disk test tools.
Is this the main drive on your pc?
Could you boot from live media (I prefer workstation) then install gparted and check the drive with that tool?
While I do not suspect a problem with the partition manager, I do suspect that the system may not have been hung but that it was performing the task (however slowly) and may have been powered off while writing to the drive. This is a sure disaster in the making if I am correct.
I never use linux tools to resize an ntfs file system (I do this from within windows). The windows disk manager is made for that task.
Here is the update. Attached the hard drive to a Windows 11 machine and used data recovery software to retrieve the information. All the data was easily retrievable from the old NTFS partition, but the other partition is completely invisible to Windows.
Whereas loading it back into the Fedora machine shows me the complete space available. So, no irretrievable data problem, but still a pain to get through.
If anybody is interested, the program I used on Windows is called Get Data Back, amazing tool which keeps the data tree structure as well.
It is simply that Windows does not, by default, contain the code to read EXT4 or BTRFS.
There are third party tools that claim to be able to add that ability.
The ability for Linux to read FAT and NTFS is embedded in the Linux kernel.
Linux in WSL can mount a linux filesystem. It needs the Windows name for the linux partition. Microsoft had an AI generated document that was only partly accurate and mixed text examples with images of text input.