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