Linux

just to add a little more explanation to what the other posters are suggesting.... a hard drive, from the perspective of your OS is very very simple. it's a series of bytes. for the sake of this example, let's say there are 1000 of them. they are just a series of numbers.

how do you tell apart which numbers belong to which partitions? well there's a convention: you decide that the first 10 of those numbers can be a label to indicate where partions start. e.g. your efi starts at #11 and ends at #61. root at starts at #61 and ends at #800. the label doesn't say anything about the bytes after that.

how do you know which bytes in the partions make up files? similar sort of game with a file system within the bounds of that partion - you use some of the data as a label to find the file data. maybe bytes 71-78 indicate that you can find ~/.bash_histor at bytes 732-790.

what happened when you shrunk that root partions, is you changed that label at the beginning. your root partion, it says, now starts at byte #61 and goes to #300. any bytes after that, are fair game for a new partion and filesystem to overwrite.

the point of all this, is that so far all you've done is changed some labels. the bytes that make up your files are still on the disk, but perhaps not findable. however - because every process that writes to the disk will trust those labels, any operation you do to the disk, including mounting it has a chance to overwrite the data that makes up your files.

this means:

• most of your files are probably recoverable
• do not boot the operating system on that drive, or any other that will attempt to mount it, because you risk overwring data
• before you start using any data recovery tools, make a copy of the raw bytes of the disk to a different disk, so that if the tools mess up you have an option to try again

ONLY after that is done, the first thing I'd try is setting that partion label back to what it used to say, 100gb.. if you're lucky, everything will just work. if you aren't, tools like 'photorec' can crawl the raw bytes of the disk and try and output whatever files they find.

good luck!

just restore the backup you made like reasonable people do

Live boot and fsck

If there's something really important on that disk, don't do ANYTHING, just unplug it and hand it over to a data recovery company.

If there isn't anything really important on there, go ahead and try and do it yourself.

Paying $100 to a data recovery company can save you a ton of headaches if it has the only copy of your thesis on there and you mess it up trying to fix things yourself.

There's something to know in the future, which others don't seem to have mentioned. Resizing a partition is 2 steps: resizing the filesystem, and resizing the partition.

When shrinking, you first resize the filesystem, and with this you make sure that the filesystem does not want to use data outside of the wanted shrinked size. If that not possible because you don't have enough free space, the shrink operation should tell that. After shrinking is done, you can continue with changing the partition table, to actually resize the partition.

When expanding you first expand the partition (so that the fs will have room to expand to), and then expand the filesystem.

If you're familiar with partitioning from the tools of microsoft windows, it's disk manager does the 2 steps without you noticing. This is just how most graphical partition managers work.
But it's important to be aware that the partition and the filesystem is not one and the same object. The filesystem resides in the partition like your feet does in your shoes, and the beginning of the partition helps for the system to find the beginning of the file system, which must end at the partition's end (or before that, but that's not efficient).

If you prefer graphical partition managers (I do too, it's much easier), Linux has a few of them. I recommend you to use GParted. It's a Linux based pendrive-bootable partition editor. They have an official live image, but I would recommend using the SystemRescue system (a live system too), which includes that and many other tools.
In this case, that the problem had already happened, it may or may not be easier to use this.

Simply change the partition size back to exactly what it was before. Larger might be acceptable too, not sure

I always love working with partitions because of the knowledge it gives you, but it is also certainly dangerous and from time to time it is unnevitable to suffer an accident. In any case I always try to do this type of operations with parted and if possible with GUI (gparted).

Being in the photo situation, can't you make a fsck as the error messages tell you?

fsck /dev/nvme0n1p2

If not, the most practical would be, IMHO, to boot from a rescue live, e.g. https://www.system-rescue.org/Download/ Once booted, you can lift the graphical interface with startx and do with gparted the operations you need on these partitions.

You can try to revert your previous setup with : https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

The most important thing you should do is never boot into that disk again until you have made a full backup image of it.

pff No one noticed it's just a weirdflex 😔 this dude's got a cool garden

Live boot and, if possible back up everything first. Everything as in the whole disk. So ``` dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 of=backup-disk