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I had a system running Windows 7 Home premium and Ubuntu 10.04, side by side dual boot.

I got an Ubuntu 10.10 image, so I decided to update. But during the installation I made a mistake by specifying the whole partition, and after the installation of Ubuntu 10.10, I saw that my Windows and all the other data was gone.

There were around 250GB of data. Is there any way I can recover it? I had a lot of irreplaceable photos and collections on the drive. I do have a recovery CD for my Windows, but it does not detect any Windows OS.

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  • for future use: make sure to backup all of your important data to a separate location before you attempt to do things like this. Essentially all of your data is gone, not much you can do about this (might get lucky with Weltenwanderer's suggestion, but it will only work for a few file types and only IF it works). Backups make this sort of thing no big deal, as you'd just reinstall then put your data back. Sorry for the data loss... happens to everyone who doesnt do backups regularly (happened to me then I started to do backups... has saved me a few times since too!)
    – g19fanatic
    Dec 21, 2010 at 18:31

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There are some programs you can use for data recovery (not complete a recovery) but most of what I've heard are on Windows.

But I recommend you to go check out a computer repair centre and see if they have any data recovery services available.

If you try to do it yourself, make sure to install the recovery software to some other computer. Do not use the system on the hard drive with lost files for anything else; mount it read-only if you have to, because the more you write there, the more of the old data will get over-written.

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I am afraid that most of your data will be lost forever, but you might get lucky with some of the pictures.

Boot from a Ubuntu CD and create a bit by bit image the disk to a USB disk. Then head over to http://plan99.net/~mike/#work and look for the jpeg extract program. run that on the image on the USB disk. It might be able to recover some of the images, since it scans the raw contents of the disk image and looks for the jpeg headers.

Good Luck!

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  • well, how do u do the bit-by-bit part?im new to this whole linux thing so can u explain a lil more slowly.i kno how 2 boot from a disc.thanks
    – mathew
    Dec 22, 2010 at 10:29
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Hiren's Boot CD has many programs for data recovery (some for Windows some for DOS).

Here is some more information on the different programs for hard disk recovery.

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