finding pictures ....

Hey , my mother recently was having problems with her windows 7 laptop, it turns out that the OS was currupted and needed fixed . So, I installed linux mint to find her problems , (she needed to find a huge cache of pictures ) I need to find the pictures but I can't reinstall windows without destroying the pictures . i need to figure out how to find the pictures , I've spent hours going through the Terminal and the GUI , not being able to find the things I was trying to get. Is it possible to find these files or are they gone ? If i could get some sort of terminal commands to find them then that would be fine ! :p

I will tell you that you can reinstall Windows 7 without wiping the drive, contrary to what the installer says... I am completely removed from Windows at this point but would have to google the answer as well. I do know it can be done.

Is the partition mounted? Can you see the Windows partition from within file manager in Mint?

If you can, you can search those folders with the search utility to find them. If you can't, please type sudo fdisk -l in terminal and copy the printout here. Also, please open /etc/fstab and post the contents here.

It's too late now if you have installed Mint but, you could have done this from the Mint Live CD. Find the windows partition with fdisk, mount it if it is not and browse it. Which option did you select when installing Mint? One of them will overwrite the disk so your first step would be following the suggestions above by metropoli10.

yancek is right. Go to CGSecurity org and get testdisk. It works. When converting to Linux, I was back and forth, missing items, etc. and Windows installer service became inoperable to the point that MS said to format. That wasn't an option. If your partition tables aren't damaged, assuming you installed just Mint and wiped the drive, run testdisk. It can restore partition tables and the data is readable. At that point, boot from a live CD and try to recover the information you lost...

hey thank you , I made sure on install I did not choose the overwrite option because finding the pictures was my ultimate goal . , I opened up the terminal and typed in sudo fdisk -I but it came up with a invalid option reply , so I am in the prosscess of downloading test disk as Metro said , .... I just downloaded test disk but opens as a derctory , any help with that? I extracted it from its .tar file and it looks like I should compile it?? fdisk [options] -l <disk> is for viewing partions and its coming up as a syntax error ..... this is kinda of giving me a headache , I can not find my Windows partion through fossil ... I tried going to etc fstab but it was empty ............. this is not over !!!! WE WILL GET IT!!!! :D

The error you got is because you entered the command incorrectly. It is a Lower Case Letter L, not an I so: sudo fdisk -l
If you see a partition which looks like this, you have a windows partition. The last column: HPFS/NTFS is indicative of a windows partition. The first column in the example below shows the drive/partition, sda2 in this case.

Quote:

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dev/sda2 208845 82959659 41375407+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

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If you see that, mount it with a command similar to this: sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda2 /mnt

You will need to change sda2 to whatever partition shows on your system. If you get no error output you should be able to go to the /mnt directory and see your windows files. If you get an error, post it here.

To further yancek's comment, please be sure to read the instructions VERY carefully once you get to the CG Security part...

This is for the live cd creation:
cgsecurity org/wiki/Create_a_TestDisk_FreeDos_LiveCD

This is to install it once you have it loaded:
cgsecurity org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

thanks , I went and re entered the command and It comes up with one of the partions being a a Solaris / linux swap ... I also have a extended partion but no HPFS/NTFS , :shock: I really hope I didn't overwrite anything considering this would be my 2nd time duel booting a OS .....

The test disk instructions are a bit vage ...Can you guys give me a little more direct instructions to do this ? thanks ,

Quote:

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one of the partions being a a Solaris / linux swap ... I also have a extended partion but no HPFS/NTFS

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That would indicate you have no windows partitions. Sometimes fdisk does not recognize partitions so you could try downloading GParted or Parted Magic, burn either to a disk and booting with it and re-checking the partitions with it. You could check the Mint menu to see if you have GParted already installed, although I don't think it is be default. Check the link below for instructions on using TestDisk. I've never had to use it myself so I can't do anymore than post the link.

TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity