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I installed Elementary OS last night and in the process have potentially messed up my hard drive. Right now all I care about is being able to copy over important files that are still on the Windows partition (could have saved a lot of trouble doing this before I know...).

I'm currently running Ubuntu from a USB so I don't do anything else stupid. Opening up disks shows /dev/sda3 (Windows partition) as having an unknown File System. The problem is the partition is too big (227GB) for me to be able to copy it anywhere (actual amount of files I need saving is max 1GB). As a result I'm nervous about trying any methods I see online as they're only single use cases. TestDisk has come up a lot, although I have so many partitions I don't know what is important.

Windows doesn't show up in GRUB or os-prober and I can't mount any partitions since it doesn't recognise the file system as NTFS even when I specify.

Also, I think there are way too many partitions on the drive. I count 7:

  • 1: 105MB - EFI System
  • 2: 134MB - Microsoft Reserved
  • 3: 227GB - Basic Data
  • 4: 11GB - Basic Data
  • 5: 4GB - Basic Data
  • 6: 5.2MB - BIOS Boot
  • 7: 8.6GB - Linux Swap

The only partitions with known content are 4 and 7, which are Ext4 and Swap.

I used this guide for separating the partitions, after I freed space on the C drive in Windows Disk Manager.

Attempting to mount the sda3 using

sudo mount -t ntfs  /dev/sda3 /media/hdd

and the error is "The device '/dev/sda3' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS."

Happy to provide any more info

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  • How big is the drive, and do you remember the partition layout before you messed it up?
    – qasdfdsaq
    Oct 20, 2015 at 15:12
  • The drive is 250GB and no. I'm guessing the layout before was whatever the default is for Windows i.e. C drive and reserved partitions Oct 20, 2015 at 15:18
  • Honestly, my first recommendation at this point is to get another drive of equal or bigger size to do a complete backup. They're really not very expensive.
    – qasdfdsaq
    Oct 20, 2015 at 15:21

1 Answer 1

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If you use fdisk from Linux, and select sda3, it will likely tell you the partition id is not valid. Use "m" for help in fdisk. "p" will print out the existing partition table. Look for the NTFS partition number, look at the available partition types using "l", then change the partition ID using "t". It will prompt you for the partition number and type. Save and exit using "w".

Once you've done this, you should be able to see the disk partition using:

udisks --show-info /dev/sdaN

where "N" is your partition number.

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  • Thanks, but this error comes up "WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sda'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted." Oct 20, 2015 at 17:08

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