Ubuntu :: Recover Lost Data From A Wiped Windows 7?
Jul 18, 2011
I bought a new dell studio 1555 from best buy about a year and a half ago. Got the warranty because I have 4 kids and something is bound to be dropped, spilled or smashed at some point. True to my visions, something did get dropped smashed and spilled, and pennies got stuck in the dvd slot. So I took it in when the screen stopped coming on because of a loose connection in the hinge and they did apparently fix that problem, but also were benevolent enough to wipe out my entire hard drive, operating sytem and all, totally free of charge. I guess they figured since I like accidents so much, I would just LOVE having 18 months of data and programs disappear into thin air. I know all about how I should have backed it up, and I am not whining too much over this. I will roll with the punches. But there are just a FEW things on that hard drive I will really miss. Like a few crucial spreadsheets that I was not able to save to my external drive before the screen went south. Now that windows 7, I am not planning on missing at all. In fact I am loving running my new Ubuntu 11.04 from my usb and knowing that those idiots will not be able to screw this one up next time. But I would really like to be able to recover those files if I can. Is there any way to get those back? And I also cannot figure out how to find device manager. Do I have to install to hard drive to use that? I know these are all probably total newbie questions. But hey, i got here as soon as I could. Everybody has got to start somewhere.
I realise that this is not a pure Linux Q, but I am hoping for tolerance and even help!After removing the partitions (/,/home) that held an older Linux installation, gparted showed the original Windows XP partition followed by the new unallocated space. On rebooting, there was a Grub rescue error (text not noted, sorry). A live install running gparted shows a totally empty disk!
The removed OS was booted via Grub2 and I imagine that it is choking when there is no secondary(?) file to be found since it was vaped. I also imagine that this is a fairly straight-forward matter, something like replacing the MBR but I am so far from Windows these days that I am unsure how to progress with rescuing the partition. The machine has no floppy - that's how I would have initially booted it way back when. Is this something that I can do either through a Linux live distro or via a Windows CD?
my mother wanted to update her iphone and during the process something happened and all of the phone has been wiped and we don't know what to do, regular recovery tools only work with regular storage media and the iphones file structure is too advanced to the point where you can only do this with a machow can i recover the data if there was no backup on the computer that it was using to upgrade
My main partition having all my data like movies, music, files,etc has become inaccessible. Its file system was NTFS. Due to some recent resizing using GParted, the partition as well as my WIndows 7 OS has become unbootable due to some errors. The data partition's file system has become unknown. I don't care much about the OS but I would like to recover my drive. I am trying to achieve this using Testdisk and Photorec but haven't met with much success so far. The main problem is I can see my partition and all my files through Testdisk but I am not able to copy them to another drive. When I try to copy the option I get is of copying them to the DVD and not to any other partition.
I have 3 drives in my computer. I installed Fedora 11 on my two biggest one, with the LVM treating them as one single drive. I attempted to install XP on my last drive. As I was installing, I selected my third drive (I'm 100% sure it is the correct drive as it is an 80gb whilst the others are 120 and 200 respectively) and told it to delete the partition on that drive and format. After I did that, it started to format, starting with my 120! I'm fairly sure that it was merely a quick format, as it only took 5-10 seconds for it to format, and that my data is still there. Is there any way to recover my "lost" data, or did I just really screw myself over?
By mistake I formatted an ext3 partition on my external hard-drive. Now it has turned into a vfat filesystem. Is their any chance of recovering the lost data?
I installed Ext2fsd from windows XP because I needed access to a text file on my ubuntu install. However, it didn't work because the drive is ext4 and all it listed was the root folders (/home, /var etc..) nothing any deeper.
I closed the app and continued working in windows.
Today I went to start my computer and it loaded the grub-rescue> prompt. I immediately tried to run "help" to find out what happened, however, grub reported the command as unknown.
I then ls and got a partial listing of the partitions.
Code: (hd0) (hd0,5) (hd0,1) (fd0)
So what do I do? How do I recover my linux partition? If the partition is bad - then how is the bios able to find the grub-rescue> prompt?
i was using 10.10 and this disaster occured when i tried to install 11.04 replacing 10.10. i have a separate home partition, while installing 11.04 i chose one weird option called "encrypt home partition"i didnt chose to format the home partition but once the installation is over, i have all my data lost in home directory.Is ther any chance that i could get the 165 gb junk data or atleast some 200 mb of important data
When I installed Ubuntu, it created a folder called 'ubuntu' on my hard drive. Is there a way to recover my data from this folder and use it with a newer version of ubuntu. I can't access Ubuntu on my computer. It boots straight into Windows.
I have a full Ubuntu 9.10x64 install on an external hard drive and I was recently asked by a friend who has a laptop running 32 bit vista if I might be able to help him in recovering anything from pictures to Quick Books files. He believes the hard drive is corrupted. His laptop is an HP with less than 2 gigs of ram, and he is not sure about the motherboard/chipset. It may or may not support x64. He went out and bought an iMac the other day so he wouldn't need to deal with not having a working computer.
Now I have 2 questions. The first being, I am wondering if my x64 install will still be able to run if I tried booting to it from his computer in the event that the chipset that does not support 64 bit architecture, or do I need to revert to a 32 bit install? My instinct/what I perceive to be the obvious answer, is that yes, my x64 install should/will be able to boot via the bios. My second question is: how do I go about loading Ubuntu once the external is plugged into the iMac?
I bought an IcyBox NAS a little while back, and it recently died on me. I have physical access to the disks inside (1.5TB RAID 1 array), and the box was running a version of Linux. I now have the difficulty of retrieving the data from the disks. As best I can tell, the NAS uses software RAID. All I have available are 2 Windows machines, one of which has sufficient free space to hold the data from the NAS. I've booted one of the Windows machines into Linux using a Ubuntu CD, and Ubuntu can see the array drive(s), but cannot mount them.
What would be the quickest and easiest way to retrieve the data from the disks? What data can I collect from Ubuntu (10.10) that will help me pin down why it can't mount the array volume?
i specifically told ubuntu to install alongside my operation system (windows) and instead it installed over windows and deleted all the other partitions... i had 200gb of data that i completely lost is there anyway to recover this data?
I dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows, and I just about an hour ago upgraded to 9.10 from Jaunty. After I restarted my computer two versions of Ubuntu could be booted, Windows was not on the GRUB menu. I am new to programming, and am completely clueless as to why this happened, and how I can fix this.
Some days ago I decided to reinstall windows, of course windows wiped Grub of the MBR. No problem. I booted of the live CD (9.10) and tried to reinstall grub, I had Ubuntu 9.10 installed before windows wiped grub. I tried the following tutorial: [URL] My fdisk -l output is the following: root@ubuntu:~# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000f2962 [Code]....
sda3 is my root partition, sda2 is the partition where all my media files are located. I mounted /dev/sda3 to /media/root and then I tried to reinstall grub with: sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/root /dev/sda It came out with no errors, and then I restarted my computer. Grub started, but with a command line. It was the 1,97 beta-4 version. Since I'm quite unfamiliar with GRUB (or really technical linux stuff)
I need a way to recover my Windows partition that was completely repartitioned when I originally moved to Ubuntu.
When I first moved to Ubuntu 8.04, I somehow overwrote my Windows partition. It happened on a laptop and since then, I've purchased a new one so I can now go back and attempt to unzip the partition holding 10.04 and get to the files I had under Windows.
I'm using Xubuntu and have lost my bottom status bar so that if I minimize programs they vanish from the screen and I have no idea if they are running or not and cannot recover them, I cannot use web mail notifier either as I cannot get to the icon which is normally at the bottom of the screen. I suspect one of my kids have altered settings some where.
I was trying to resize to the left the sdb5 partition where ubuntu is/was installed and things got messy. I lost the partition it was unallocated. Next "cleverly" used livecd and reinstall ubuntu (thinking it was just like a repair the system thing) but instead ubuntu install from new...all my data is lost...gone with the wind. I try sadly enough testdisk but it says partition corrupted impossible to recover. Now the whole disk shows as unallocated in gparted.
I am running ubuntu from a second hard drive and strange enough my windows 7 partition with files is save and sound. I wonder if there is anything I can do to recover my files (guess the enitre partition now is lost). I try photorec and no files were able to recover then try scalpel and it says files were not find or couldn't read the partition. Of course "cleverly" I didn't had a recent back up of my files. Now I cant access the new ubuntu partition that still in sdb5 at boot takes me directly to windows 7.
I deleted my hard disk , where I had a triple boot of vista, ubuntu and kubuntu after hours of work , I was not able to recover my ubuntu partition and lost everything .Now I need to recover some of my partitions .I am running a live cd
The output of fdisk -l is
How to use parted to rescue my partition , gparted shows the enitre disk as unallocated.
I was using testdisk to recover one of my lost partition and when I rebooted my system it says , "error unknown filesystem ".I am giving a screenshot of gparted
I had 10.04 installed in parallel with a bad windows OS. Used the 10.04 to pull the documents, pics, etc off of windows. Worked great. Then when I tried to delete the windows partition it screwed grub up an instead of just re-installing grub. I re-installed ubuntu, what the heck it was gonna get wiped anyway. I didn't back up the pics and documents. I did however have them in all the ubuntu folders for my pics etc.
I feel like total crap, anyway, how good of a chance do I have at getting something back with testdisk? After doing a "deeper search" I come up with multiple partitions but it won't let me restore all of them. I really dont care if I can't boot to a single one, just as long as I can get the data back. (always can use a live CD).
I woke up this morning to a non-booting 9.10 computer. After my grub screen disappears, I get the familiar Ubuntu b/w logo in the center of my screen. My hard drive cranks for an abnormally long time and then I get the following error:
I booted into a live CD and opened up GPARTED and my sdb4 (my /home location) partition shows up. I do a check on it and it seems ok.
I opened the Palimpsest Disk Utility to see what it said and it shows sdb4 as Unknown or Unused. I can not mount this drive using GUI methods.
I did some research on the forums looking to recover lost partitions. here is the output from fsck
Code:
and the abbreviated output from fdisk -l
Code:
Disk identifier:
This seems ok too.
My next step was to try testdisk. When I ran it, I was able to navigate this partition and apparently see all my files. I then tried to mount the partition manually.
Code:
That also worked.
It seems to me that I practically have this thing where I need it without too many worries.
My question is: What is the next step to get this back booting again? I'm afraid of rewriting the partitions in testdisk until I get some feedback on whether this will really solve my problem. Maybe the partition isn't the problem? Is it something else and I've been going down the wrong path?
I was backing up my hard drive last night when the backup drive died. Somehow some files are now missing from my hard drive. Any idea how to recover them on the hard drive. I'm using Mint 7, I was preparing to move to Mint
Now am terribly frustrated because i reinstalled my linux installation(Ubuntu 8.04) after falling prey to an inode error. So i reinstalled stuff under my root partition under which i had some files which i obviously lost.I have tried recovering the files (mostly mp3 files) using photorec and the max file size i managed to recover was 4.0MB. the rest fall in the tune of 300kb.My question is, is there a way to make a full recovery of the above files seeing that they indeed can be recovered?
I've been using Ubuntu 10.10 on my EEE-PC for most of my thesis research, but I left it running a python script overnight and now I can't get it to login. I was running low on disk-space, and I think the problem is that the script generated a lot of text files and used up all of the available hard drive space.
Now, whenever I try to boot the machine, it reaches the user-select/login screen, but logging in just causes it to go black for a second before returning to the login screen. I have Ubuntu 11.04 on a USB, and Ubuntu Rescue Remix on another, and both allow me to boot up my machine, but I can't see my hard-drive - neither in /mnt/ nor in /media/ - in order to copy my thesis files or to delete some excess text files to free up some hard-drive space.
I was following a tutorial about 6 months ago that I think may have been for a different version of Fedora than I was running. Long story short I screwed up my installation and cannot get past this screen. The login screen has lost all of it's custom GUI theme and I can't log in. For one reason because after 6 months I can't remember my password (which is also strange because I only use the same few passwords for OS logins). I also get this error that pops up and then goes away on it's own.
Install Problem! The configuration manager defaults for GNOME power manager have not been installed correctly. Please contact your computer administrator. I also get a caution sign icon like this one in the system tray on the login page. When I click on it it tells me that: Starting Avahi deamon... [FAILED]
I'm not sure I want to spend the time fixing the install as I was planning on giving KDE a spin. I do, however, want to be able to recover some files on the partitions that Fedora was using. Can I just install Fedora KDE on a fresh hard drive and be able to see those partitions automatically and then transfer it to an external? Or will I have to find and mount all of those partitions manually? Also, will I even be able to gain access to those files considering I don't remember my password?
I'm browsing on my phone which is not letting me scroll to the end of this text box so I will say thank you in advance for any replies now.After my computer was switched off abruptly after a power outage I have many errors upon booting. My hard drive setup consists of a RAID0 array of two 500GB sata disks. The partition table (from my head!) goes like this:50GB NTFS Windows XP /c/50GB ext4 Ubuntu 9.10 /4GB swapThe rest is a large NTFS partition all the way up to the end of the array at 987GB. Mounted at /media/share/I am thinking I will have to start again (I won't lose much, I have recent backups), but what is the best way of restoring the system as much as I can? Currently my computer has been booted into Ubuntu for over an hour, and after pressing ctrl+alt+shift+F2 I can see that it is finding errors still, now at sector 6008. Should I let this run its course or REISUB it and boot onto a live CD. I think the main problem is with an NTFS partition
Well, my laptop slid off my couch and crashed down onto hardwood floor. The hard drive is shot. I was using grub and had both ubuntu 10.10 and windows 7 on it. Can't load either OS.
What options do I have for trying to recover data off the ubuntu partition? I tried loading livecd...for some reason, it won't work. Does livecd require a working harddisk?
It seems my 320gb HDD has bitten the dust. The timing couldn't be more ironic as I have spent a couple of days tidying the files on it to burn them to disk.
This is an ntfs drive that had indicated 4 bad sectors but up until today (backup day) was fine. I am unable to mount it and in fact it is causing some sort of conflict with the OS drive and wont let the system boot up successfully.
I am going to try using a windows based PC tomorrow to see if I can rescue the data.
Are there any 'other' tricks to try and mount it with ubuntu that I may not have tried so far? I have tried-
mkdir /media/disk fdisk -l to establish it's name which was /dev/sdb1 when it was all working but it isn't reachable and doesn't show in the places menu or in any of the menus when using a live CD to get round the HDD clash. sudo mount -a used in desperation after the mkdir but nothing.
I rejigged the cabling inside the PC to make the HDD a secondary master as it was a slave on the primary IDE to start with in the hope that the system would boot up normally but to no avail.
I inadvertently started creating a boot disk over an entire 300GB external hard drive. Needless to say, I had all sorts of data saved on there. I stopped it early on in the process by turning off the drive, but I now I don't know how to salvage what's left.
