Very Important data lost Please help

[naqvisat]

Hi Dear Friends
I had initially installed xp then I wanted to install ubuntu 9.04 while installation I selected side by side. I selected to install ubuntu in C where already there was xp. now the problem is that for drive D the file system was ntfs but while installation I selected EXT3. so what it did is that it formatted my drive and I can not see any single file which I had in C or D drive. even windows xp has also deleted I don't know how... but the point is that I want to recover my D drive data please help me what to do... it is very urgent.

thanks

[fancypiper]

Sorry, I am afraid that you have erased it and it's gone forever.

[howefield]

Sorry, I am afraid that you have erased it and it's gone forever.

Possibly, maybe even likely. But it is worth checking first before bringing in the doom and gloom merchants.


please help me what to do... it is very urgent.

Can you open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and post the output of


fdisk -l

If you have over written your files, it may be possible to recover some of the data.

[ShapeShiftme]

How mean to make it sound worse than it is.
Data is 95 % of the time recoverable. The main problems are how to do it/ how long will it take and 3rd would be / how much will it cost.

Your main problem is that you formated over NTFS with EXT. so that makes things harded my first step as a sugestion is for you to install testdisk. use a software manager.

Then from console run

testdisk /dev/sda

Cinsidering testdisk /dev/sda is the hard drive in question. The scan the disk for files.
It is a awsome program but it take s a LONG LONG time. But hopefully that will help
Regards

[fancypiper]

How mean to make it sound worse than it is.
Data is 95 % of the time recoverable.:redface:
I didn't intend to sound mean, but I did something similar in 1999 and tried everything I could find in forums and suggestions in user mailing lists. I had lost it all.

I hope he isn't one of the 5 percent club.:)

[naqvisat]

fdisk -l did not show any output not even any message.

when i tried testdisk /dev/sda it showed
unable to open the file/device /dev/sda
I also tried for sda1 and sda2 but it did not work... please any other way???
I will be very thankful

[alphaniner]

You need to use sudo with those commands:


sudo fdisk -l


sudo testdisk /dev/sda

[naqvisat]

Hi thank you all and the result of sudo fdisk -l is as follows
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x77777777

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 3824 30716248+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 3825 14593 86501992+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 3825 14267 83883366 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 14268 14571 2441848+ 83 Linux

[fancypiper]

Great! there is still hope, I think, at least for your C drive.

Try mounting the filesystem and see if you can see anything.

sudo mkdir /mnt/win
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/win
sudo ls/mnt/win

[naqvisat]

thank you and also please mention how to mount the file system as i am not an expert in ubuntu.

thank you very much

[fancypiper]

Basically, create a mount directory
Mount the device on the mount directory
list the files in the directory

In a terminal, paste these commands:
sudo mkdir /mnt/win
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/win
sudo ls /mnt/win

[naqvisat]

Hi there is no results founds like this
fuse: failed to access mountpoint /mnt/win: No such file or directory

[naqvisat]

Hi
I think instead of midir it should be mkdir??? for make directory the very first command.
Am i right or wrong?

[fancypiper]

You're right. I am a lousy typist!