Serious problem: Windows 7 64bit not being identified.

[sun1181]

Gentlemen,
After a longtime, i tried to install Ubuntu 10.04 alongside Windows 7 64bit. Please not that I installed linux after Windows. For some reason, the whole drive is being shown as "Free space" apart from the Ubuntu & Swap partitions.
How can i recover my windows? I have very important files there. Please help.

Thanks,
Sun.

The grub config is attached. Please let me know.. please help. <in panic>

[Irithori]

From the looks of it, you told the ubuntu installer to take the whole disc sda (2TByte).
And that´s what it did, installing ubuntu on it.

As data was written to the disc, the windows filesystem was undoubtedly damaged, if not destroyed.
You may try TestDisk and PhotoRec from here Main Page - CGSecurity

But the better way is to restore from an (hopefully existing) backup.

[sun1181]

Thanks for your response lrithori, no i did not ask for a clean install. what i found is, there was one "mount point" so i made 2 other partitions of 9GB for the os and 10GB for the swap.. but somehow even at that point, it showed the entire NTFS disk as "free space" . so i thought it might be a glitch with the ntfs reading.. and continued to install.. now it still shows the rest of the 2TB harddrive as "free space".

Please help.

[Irithori]

You might actually be lucky.
I missed, that the GPT sda1 partition starts at sector 3,887,497,884.
(I just looked at the end sector of 3,907,029,118 )

The two partitions here match the size you mentioned (9GByte and 190GByte)
/dev/sda1 3,887,497,884 3,907,029,118 19,531,235 Data partition (Windows/Linux)
/dev/sda2 3,867,966,633 3,887,497,883 19,531,251 Swap partition (Linux)

Can you boot an up to date ubuntu liveCD (11.04) and start gparted?

[Irithori]

The partition table is somewhat screwed up.
GPT is ok, but there should be a big sda1, and then sda2 and sda3 for ubuntu.

[Irithori]

The point of the 11.04 livecd is to check, if one can access and possibly copy data before work on the partition table is done.

Actual changes might involve gdisk which is part of ubuntu 11.04.
This might be appropiate, if you know (and are absolutely sure) about the previous partition layout.

The next tool of choice would be the mentioned testdisk.

[sun1181]

Yes.. I opened Gparted, it shows, 1.8TB as unallocated space, followed by /dev/sda2 - swap (9.4GB) and \dev\sda1 - ext 4 (9.4GB).
I do not understand why it is showing the NTFS space as "unallocated".

Please help.. Thanks.
Sun.

[Irithori]

Hmm.
The next step is tricky, as it is potentially destructive.
Depending on the importance of your data, you might want to consider professional service instead of the advice of some random forum guy.

What *I* would do is to try to restore the partition table from what I remember how it should be ( == how I created it) and set the type right (ntfs in your case) .

But again, if you do or dont do that is your decision.

These might help:
A gdisk Walkthrough
Repairing GPT Disks

[Irithori]

What might help to prevent further damage is to create a copy on blocklevel with dd.
For that you need
- a livecd
- dd
- another disk with more that 2TB free space
- a lot of time

Once you have such an image of the whole disc, you can start experimenting with the 2TB disk.
If something goes wrong, restore the image and start from scratch.