Hard drive data can't be seen after shrink and reformat

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.

System Details:
Operating System: Bazzite 41
KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.9.0
Qt Version: 6.8.1
Kernel Version: 6.12.8-201.bazzite.fc41.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 32 × AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-Core Processor
Memory: 30.5 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
Manufacturer: ASRock
Product Name: B650M-HDV/M.2

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.

Hello, very sorry for the delay in answering.

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?

This is a secondary hard drive, the main drive is intact.

This is a sure disaster in the making if I am correct.

I guess this means the data is gone?

Well, have you tried opening it from Windows? And if nothing else works you could always try some sort of recovery tool.

I will open it from Windows tomorrow, and report back. I plan to use ‘get data back’ in case I can’t find it, but I am optimistic, for now…

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.

Hopefully you are aware that windows cannot ever see linux file systems.
Linux can easily see windows file systems.

Thus the situation you describe.

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Well, I wasn’t ! That’s one new thing I learnt today about Linux :smiley:

Could you please briefly explain why? Or point me to a resource, I am glad to read about it

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.

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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.

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Thanks everyone, learned a bunch of new stuff

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