I am looking for some advice following a cock up.

This morning I had a dual boot pc redhat / xp pro. I wanted to add
ubuntu, which I have managed successfully in the past but this time I
didnt check the partitioning properly and the installation (5.10 if
that is relevant) has knocked out my xp pro installation and data.

The drive was partitioned previously with a data disk which I cannot
find with ubuntu, can anyone offer any advice as to the best way to
proceed with recovering my data?

If I re-install windows I could use partition magic but I dont want to
make matters worst since I have no real say in the windows
installation.

midgleyben@hotmail.com wrote:
> I am looking for some advice following a cock up.
>
> This morning I had a dual boot pc redhat / xp pro. I wanted to add
> ubuntu, which I have managed successfully in the past but this time I
> didnt check the partitioning properly and the installation (5.10 if
> that is relevant) has knocked out my xp pro installation and data.
>
> The drive was partitioned previously with a data disk which I cannot
> find with ubuntu, can anyone offer any advice as to the best way to
> proceed with recovering my data?

Unless you only partitioned the drive, you should be able to poke around
with fdisk and setting the partition types to be able to read it. If you
built a new filesystem on top of the old XP partitions, you're basically
screwed unless you pay thousands of dollars to a data recovery service or
invest many hundreds of man-hours in seriously arcane tools.

> If I re-install windows I could use partition magic but I dont want to
> make matters worst since I have no real say in the windows
> installation.

Don't use partition magic! It will almost inevitably rebuild your
filesystems, which is not what you want.

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> midgleyben@hotmail.com wrote:
> > I am looking for some advice following a cock up.
> >
> > This morning I had a dual boot pc redhat / xp pro. I wanted to add
> > ubuntu, which I have managed successfully in the past but this time I
> > didnt check the partitioning properly and the installation (5.10 if
> > that is relevant) has knocked out my xp pro installation and data.
> >
> > The drive was partitioned previously with a data disk which I cannot
> > find with ubuntu, can anyone offer any advice as to the best way to
> > proceed with recovering my data?
>
> Unless you only partitioned the drive, you should be able to poke around
> with fdisk and setting the partition types to be able to read it. If you
> built a new filesystem on top of the old XP partitions, you're basically
> screwed unless you pay thousands of dollars to a data recovery service or
> invest many hundreds of man-hours in seriously arcane tools.
>

I am unsure what the ubuntu installation does, it was quite quick so I
suspect it has just removed the original partitions, or at the most
used a quick format, I will ask on an ubuntu newsgroup. fdisk has not
helped so far but then I am no expert in this.... so what are these
arcane tools, I need this data back and if it means a lot of time I
will have to go though a learning curve and spend the time.

> > If I re-install windows I could use partition magic but I dont want to
> > make matters worst since I have no real say in the windows
> > installation.
>
> Don't use partition magic! It will almost inevitably rebuild your
> filesystems, which is not what you want.

noted, thanks.

midgleyben@hotmail.com wrote:
> Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

>> Unless you only partitioned the drive, you should be able to poke
>> around with fdisk and setting the partition types to be able to read
>> it. If you built a new filesystem on top of the old XP partitions,
>> you're basically screwed unless you pay thousands of dollars to a
>> data recovery service or invest many hundreds of man-hours in
>> seriously arcane tools.
>>
>
> I am unsure what the ubuntu installation does, it was quite quick so I
> suspect it has just removed the original partitions, or at the most
> used a quick format, I will ask on an ubuntu newsgroup. fdisk has not
> helped so far but then I am no expert in this.... so what are these
> arcane tools, I need this data back and if it means a lot of time I
> will have to go though a learning curve and spend the time.

Well, the good ones are really expensive, and unless the field has changed a
lot, the cheap ones won't do you much good at this point. Rebuilding a
filesystem blows away the indexes that say where files are, what blocks go
together to make the file, etc.. The last time I had to do that myself, it
meant doing a full "dd" of the whole disk, writing a widget to do scans of
every freaking block and look for the in-document titles of the PDF files
the professor had lost, and processing the whole damn thing to find the
nearby blocks to re-assemble them. By hand. I only got a few of the files,
and the system had never been backed up, and the professor could afford to
waste that much of my time but not to pay a recovery service that had tools
to re-assemble stuff like that.

In your position, I'd do a google search or ask in a Windows group: the el
cheapo tools may be less than $200, but the really good/powerful/gets files
off a completely erased drive in order to convict someone tools are in the
thousands of dollars.

In message <DIOdnZQgTK1DrS_ZnZ2dnUVZ_sidnZ2d@comcast.com>
"Nico Kadel-Garcia" <nkadel@comcast.net> wrote:

> midgleyben@hotmail.com wrote:
>> Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>
>>> Unless you only partitioned the drive, you should be able to poke
>>> around with fdisk and setting the partition types to be able to read
>>> it. If you built a new filesystem on top of the old XP partitions,
>>> you're basically screwed unless you pay thousands of dollars to a
>>> data recovery service or invest many hundreds of man-hours in
>>> seriously arcane tools.
>>>
>>
>> I am unsure what the ubuntu installation does, it was quite quick so I
>> suspect it has just removed the original partitions, or at the most
>> used a quick format, I will ask on an ubuntu newsgroup. fdisk has not
>> helped so far but then I am no expert in this.... so what are these
>> arcane tools, I need this data back and if it means a lot of time I
>> will have to go though a learning curve and spend the time.
>
> Well, the good ones are really expensive, and unless the field has changed a
> lot, the cheap ones won't do you much good at this point. Rebuilding a
> filesystem blows away the indexes that say where files are, what blocks go
> together to make the file, etc.. The last time I had to do that myself, it
> meant doing a full "dd" of the whole disk, writing a widget to do scans of
> every freaking block and look for the in-document titles of the PDF files
> the professor had lost, and processing the whole damn thing to find the
> nearby blocks to re-assemble them. By hand. I only got a few of the files,
> and the system had never been backed up, and the professor could afford to
> waste that much of my time but not to pay a recovery service that had tools
> to re-assemble stuff like that.
>
> In your position, I'd do a google search or ask in a Windows group: the el
> cheapo tools may be less than $200, but the really good/powerful/gets files
> off a completely erased drive in order to convict someone tools are in the
> thousands of dollars.

Last time we had to pay a service to get the contents of a 1GB disk
back, I think it cost over 1000 UKP. And that was over 5 years ago.


>
>


--
Alan Adams, from Northamptonshire
alan.adams@orchard-way.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.nckc.org.uk/

On Fri, 07 Jul 2006 12:33:05 -0700, midgleyben wrote:

> I am looking for some advice following a cock up.
>
> This morning I had a dual boot pc redhat / xp pro. I wanted to add
> ubuntu, which I have managed successfully in the past but this time I
> didnt check the partitioning properly and the installation (5.10 if
> that is relevant) has knocked out my xp pro installation and data.
>
> The drive was partitioned previously with a data disk which I cannot
> find with ubuntu, can anyone offer any advice as to the best way to
> proceed with recovering my data?
>
> If I re-install windows I could use partition magic but I dont want to
> make matters worst since I have no real say in the windows
> installation.

This article may help:

System recovery with Knoppix

Carla Schroder (dworks-at-bratgrrl.com), Consultant, Tux Computing

23 Oct 2003

This article shows how to access a non-booting Linux system with a
Knoppix CD, get read-write permissions on configuration files, create
and manage partitions and filesystems, and copy files to various
storage media and over the network. You can use Knoppix for hardware
and system configuration detection and for creating and managing
partitions and filesystems. You can do it all from Knoppix's excellent
graphical utilities, or from the command line.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...-lnxw10Knoppix

Robin T Cox <nomail@nomail.net> writes:

>On Fri, 07 Jul 2006 12:33:05 -0700, midgleyben wrote:

>> I am looking for some advice following a cock up.
>>
>> This morning I had a dual boot pc redhat / xp pro. I wanted to add
>> ubuntu, which I have managed successfully in the past but this time I
>> didnt check the partitioning properly and the installation (5.10 if
>> that is relevant) has knocked out my xp pro installation and data.
>>
>> The drive was partitioned previously with a data disk which I cannot
>> find with ubuntu, can anyone offer any advice as to the best way to
>> proceed with recovering my data?

If you told us what the partitioning was and what you did, more help might
be possible. If you installed Ubuntu over top of your XP partition, then
clearly (most) of your data is lost. It has been overwritten, and you
cannot recover from that for less than $1000000 and even then probably not.
If not maybe but even then it is doubtful.


>>
>> If I re-install windows I could use partition magic but I dont want to
>> make matters worst since I have no real say in the windows
>> installation.

And how would partition magic help?


>This article may help:

>System recovery with Knoppix

>Carla Schroder (dworks-at-bratgrrl.com), Consultant, Tux Computing

>23 Oct 2003

> This article shows how to access a non-booting Linux system with a
> Knoppix CD, get read-write permissions on configuration files, create
> and manage partitions and filesystems, and copy files to various
> storage media and over the network. You can use Knoppix for hardware
> and system configuration detection and for creating and managing
> partitions and filesystems. You can do it all from Knoppix's excellent
> graphical utilities, or from the command line.

>http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...-lnxw10Knoppix

Sure, but you cannot recover overwritten partitions.
So until the OP tells us what the actaul situation is, solutions are
probably going to be tangential to the problem.

midgleyben@hotmail.com wrote in
news:1152300785.467178.250040@s53g2000cws.googlegr oups.com:

> I am looking for some advice following a cock up.
>
> This morning I had a dual boot pc redhat / xp pro. I wanted to add
> ubuntu, which I have managed successfully in the past but this time I
> didnt check the partitioning properly and the installation (5.10 if
> that is relevant) has knocked out my xp pro installation and data.
>
> The drive was partitioned previously with a data disk which I cannot
> find with ubuntu, can anyone offer any advice as to the best way to
> proceed with recovering my data?
>
> If I re-install windows I could use partition magic but I dont want to
> make matters worst since I have no real say in the windows
> installation.
>

First thing to try is doing and fdisk/mbr and then booting to linux with
a cd to see what partitions are there and try mounting them. You then
might try to copy any important data to a linux partition and go from
there. Beyond that, you'd have to check the correlation between the fats
and the files themselves to see what's scrawed. If you don't know what
that means, don't do it and stop there maybe try doing a scandisk
*without* fixxing errors just so you see what and where they are copying
all it tells you down.

--
(setq (chuck nil) car(chuck) )