Huge mistake need help 911

[esko906]

So a while back I moved from crap windows to awesome ubuntu and love it. I spent about a year on linux and had all sorts of very very important documents and files saved in my system. I cannot stress the importance of these documents and know that I am retarded for not making backups. We will start another thread for people to yell at me if you want. Heres the deal, XP was installed on this computer yesterday. They did a boot from disc install, deleting the partition and installing a fresh copy of XP. Now ******** XP is back on this cpu. My question is, is there ANYWAY long, short, whatever that I can find those files or maybe go back to my old install of ubuntu? I've heard a lot about bootloaders and whatnot but I have to get those files. I have a bunch of assignments due and need these files. Please somebody help, this is worth a paypal transfer to me so please somebody help!!!

[Irithori]

If xp has overwritten the same disc partition, that your documents were on, then that´s it.
I doubt, that you can restore the documents in that case. Sorry.

If your documents were on a separate partition *and* XP didnt use the whole disk fo itself, then there might be a chance.
Can you boot from a liveCD and report the output of:

fdisk -l

What you can also try are
PhotoRec - CGSecurity
TestDisk - CGSecurity

They *may* find files, that have not been physically overwritten.

[Rubberman]

As Irithori said, if XP was installed on the entire disc, you are likely SOL as Windows formats the disc entirely, wiping anything that was on it completely away. If someone did this on your system, without your permission, this is likely a case where justifiable homicide may be a defense...

[LSalab]

If your ubuntu was installed on ext3 partitions without LVM, you could try to boot up from a live cd and run testdisk to try to recover the old partitions, however it's a long (very long) shot if XP formated the partition. But if you have nothing to lose, then it's worth the shot. If you're lucky enough, XP didn't perform a complete format and maybe some of the files could be recovered, but as I said, it's a long shot.