Please help recover formated ubuntu 10.4 desktop installed inside windows

Question

I had windows in c:/ then i installed ubuntu 10.4 inside windows in c:/ubuntu.

i then boot and select ubuntu and worked for weeks saving my important files in ubuntu desktop folder. one day my ubuntu could boot so i incidentally reinstalled ubuntu again inside windows and replace c:/ubuntu and previous ubuntu desktop folder was wiped, i tried to recover my prevoius ubuntu desktop files with no sucess,

so i reinstalled windows and formated the whole c:/ drive and then reinstalled the same ubuntu inside windows in c:/ubuntu for the third time,

now how can i recover the first C:/ubuntu desktop folder. there were files that took me weeks to write and i don't mind one more week to try recoverig them. any help will be of great impontance.

Answer 1

Try Piriform Recuva, but I wouldn't hold out a great deal of hope, you've written a lot of changes to that disk, and the likelyhood of all your files being untouched is slim.

For future reference, if you ever accidentally delete anything you need, write to the disk as little as possible. If you can, power down the PC (This may be the one scenario where simply killing power is acceptable) and plug the drive in to another machine, and run recovery software. If you can't power down the PC, just write to the disk as little as you possibly can, because every new write has a chance of ending up inside a file you just deleted, rendering it effectively unrecoverable.

Answer 2

If you

• installed Ubuntu over the old Ubuntu folder and
• formatted the drive before installing windows

there's absolutely no practical way to recover any of those files.

All I can add to this is that you should have never put Ubuntu there in the first place. You should have created two partitions, then you can access Ubuntu files through Windows using (for example ext3) third party file system drivers. The other way round, i.e. mounting the Windows partition in Ubuntu, works pretty fine too.