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I know this has been considered impossible for quiet a long time but its now possible – actually for quiet awhile now- thanks to foremost software, it can recover files based on their headers, footers, and internal data structures. This process is known as data carving.

Foremost can work on image files, such as those generated by dd, Safeback, Encase, etc, or directly on a drive. The headers and footers can be specified by a configuration file or you can use command line switches to specify built-in file types. These built-in types look at the data structures of a given file format allowing for a more reliable and faster recovery.

Foremost can recover files with the following extensions:
jpg – Support for the JFIF and Exif formats including implementations used in modern digital cameras.
gif
png
bmp – Support for windows bmp format.
avi
exe – Support for Windows PE binaries, will extract DLL and EXE files along with their compile times.
mpg – Support for most MPEG files (must begin with 0×000001BA)
wav
riff – This will extract AVI and RIFF since they use the same file format (RIFF). note faster than running each separately.
wmv – Note may also extract -wma files as they have similar format.
mov
pdf
ole – This will grab any file using the OLE file structure. This includes PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Access, and StarWriter
doc – Note it is more efficient to run OLE as you get more bang for your buck. If you wish to ignore all other ole files then use this.
zip – Note is will extract .jar files as well because they use a similar format. Open Office docs are just zipped XML files so they are extracted as well. These include SXW, SXC, SXI, and SX? for undetermined OpenOffice files.
rar
htm
cpp – C source code detection, note this is primitive and may generate documents other than C code.
You can tweak /etc/foremost.conf to add support for more file types.

Please note that there’s no guarantee that foremost will succeed in recovering your files, but at least there’s a chance.

On Debian and Ubuntu, foremost can be installed simply by issuing this command :

apt-get install foremost

or download and extract the source from the tar.gz and run this inside the extracted dir :

make;make install

So easy , now you’re ready to start using foremost here are some example usage:

foremost -t jpeg -i /dev/sda1

in this example we are looking for all deleted jpg files on /dev/sda1 , foremost always output the results in directory called output, its created in the directory where you ran foremost so be sure to run it from a directory not located in /dev/sda1 to avoid overwriting one of your deleted files ;)

Inside the output directory you will find a file named audit.txt which the log of this restoration process and also a directory named jpg cuz we were searching for jpegs in our last example

foremost -t pdf -T -i /dev/sda1

In this example we are searching for pdf files and appending results to the output directory (because foremost will not start if there’s already an output directory)

foremost -s 100 -t jpg -i image.dd

Here we are searching for jpeg files skipping the first 100 blocks inside this dd image

foremost -t all -i /dev/sda1

Searching for all predefined types