Linux Mint Forums

Like many other Linuxnoob I have now stepped into to world of the Linux. While I am a superuser in windows and know all keyboard shortcuts and tricky stuff by heart in windows the linuxexperiance was not so great for me.And ofcourse a couple of days later I hear about the amazing noob linux where everything runs easily after installation. Thats right LinuxMint. I have 2 questions so pls take the time to read all of my post and I will be extremly happy for all help and links. Thx to u all in advance

1: Can I somehow convert my kubuntu into linuxmint without running a full install? is there a script or something I can run to fix this easily and without tears and sweat? (I will try to mess as little as possible with the harddrive as you will see in Q 2)

I started with kubuntu and made a bootdisk with the latest stable release last friday. Beeing lazy and superuser I backed up all my documents and photos to me D drive which was on the same physical drive as C. Just to be sure......

I printed out a step-by-step guide for how to make a dualboot system and got started. When I started I had the disk formatted into 2 drives, C+D with NTFS filessystem.

When I was done with installation I excpected to see a LILO or similar "boothandler" that would give me a choice to boot either winxp or kubuntu.

No, something went wrong and my windows install was gone and so was my D partition with my backup. This is not life and death serious but it would be nice if possible to still be able to extract the files out of the disk.

2:) How can I find back the files without sending disk to a specialist? I have done this once at work on a windows xp laptop, where we extracted the files from a acidently formatted drive after moutning the 2.5" drive into a workstation and running a 3rd party program. We then recovered all the needed files. Can this be done now that I have formatted the disk for Linux?

1. No.
but you can add the linux mint and mediabuntu repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list and add some of the linux mint KDE applications.

the main Linux Mint (gnome) and KDE CE mint both use the ubuntu repository (both are based off ubuntu)
ie the KDE mint does not use the Kubuntu repository.

it would be far easier for you to install Linux mint from fresh than try to convert Kubuntu.

2. you need to use a live CD like DEFT and use the command line tool testdisk. I should make sure this is on next KDE mint at least.
here is a similar post to look at:
http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... isk&t=3599
but is sounds like kubuntu overwrote your whole disk so I dont think you will be able to recover the data easily if at all. can you boot into Kbuntu?

3. what did i do wrong?
you partitioned the disk into 2 partitions C + D, this leaves no space to install linux on without it shrinking (modifying) one of your 2 partitions.
Instead of creating a second partition D you should have left that space free (no partition). then during the install at the partitioning section you should have chosen "use available free space" and taken all the defaults.

Now you can either try to repair your disk and install linux again or start from scratch and install windows to part of the disk and then install linux to the rest of the disk.

you may want to give us some system info before you start to help you setup your system.

Boo wrote:1. No.
but you can add the linux mint and mediabuntu repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list and add some of the linux mint KDE applications.

2. you need to use a live CD like DEFT and use the command line tool testdisk. I should make sure this is on next KDE mint at least.
here is a similar post to look at:
http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... isk&t=3599
but is sounds like kubuntu overwrote your whole disk so I dont think you will be able to recover the data easily if at all. can you boot into Kbuntu?

1: I will go for a new istall for sure. But u know just when I was about to give up I figured out how to work the Adept Manager in kubuntu and now I have all the codecs needed along with flash etc. And I learned as well

2: Yes I can boot just fine into kubuntu, but even if disk is formatted the files are most of the times not physically broken. What happens is that their filepath is overwritten and the actual data stays the same for upto 2-3 overwritings. So I still belive I can save me data. I will bring my disk to work and see what we can do there.

Thx for the reply and feedback.

Boo wrote: The main Linux Mint (gnome) and KDE CE mint both use the ubuntu repository (both are based off ubuntu)
ie the KDE mint does not use the Kubuntu repository.

Can I ask you why mint KDE use Ubuntu repository instead of Kubuntu repository?

@go wrote:Can I ask you why mint KDE use Ubuntu repository instead of Kubuntu repository?

Where can I find a Kubuntu repository? I have never seen such thing.