Lost windows install

[nikmad]

Hi,

Absolutely in love with mint 9. But having a bitter experience due to a stupid mistake(?).

Let me keep this short. Before installing, i had three partitions, One for windows(sized 160 gb), one for my ubuntu(sized 5.8 gb), and one i have no idea what for (sized around 100mb). Previously, i had used that 160 gb as shared between my ubuntu and windows and had my ubuntu installation on the 5.8 gb.

Now, I selected the 5.8 gb for installing mint, selected to format it and make it ext4. Mint also requested for added space to use if physical memory runs out. And i allowed it to use the 160 gb drive. Installed well, runs well.

Now to the problem, from boot menu, when i select to run windows 7, it says there is a disk error. And though mint loads nicely, it is also now unable to access the files i had previously on the 160 gb partition(it shows up on my computer, has the name"160 GB Hard Disk: System Reserved", but on looking at its properties shows only 100 mb). It now has only two folders, boot and system volume information.

So in effect, i have lost the 160 gb of files, and years of my life if i cannot get it back. Am a non techie, and a newbie. Gurus please help.

[Biker]

Ooof. In essence, when you told the installer to use that 160GB partition, it turned it into a swap partition and formated it as such. I honestly don't know if a utility such as Test Disk will allow you to recover it or not. You can try it (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk), but because the partition was changed and formatted, I'm thinking that your data is truly lost.

[Aging Technogeek]

I was about to post the essentially the same thing as biker when his post appeared. I agree with him that, barring access to police type forensic recovery programs, your data is gone.

Most, if not all, freely available recovery programs only work if the partition was deleted but not overwritten. Formatting effectively overwrites the partition so recovery is generally not possible.

[Biker]

While the swap partition works similar to the "page file" in Windows, they are two different animals. The beauty of having a swap partition in Linux is that multiple distros can use the same swap partition, saving you disk space. I have 5 distro's installed, and they all use the same swap partition.

However, because it IS a partition, when you told the installer to use that 160GB partition as your swap partition, it formatted it as a swap partition, essentially wiping all your information from that section of the disk.

Yeah, it's a tough one to swallow. I had something similar happen to me several years ago when I first started to get seriously into Linux. My BIOS didn't recognize LBA, so I found a program that allowed me to get around the limitation. 30 minutes later, I'm staring at a dead system, with no way of recovering the information I had just lost. Years of emails, photos, etc. gone in a flash. You can bet I started doing regular backups after that! Expensive lesson learned and never forgotten.

I'm happy to say that I stuck with it, and have been using Linux as my primary OS for years. Yes, I still have WIndows. It's still necessary for some applications, games, tech work, etc. But don't let this little setback (ok, BIG setback) dissuade you from giving up.

[nikmad]

Nice . I had gotten into online backup a while back and i do have that for my absolute vital files. Anyway, moving forward, how do i get back that partition. i used gparted to change it from swap to ntfs, but it refuses to mount. How do i fix that.
Thanks for your help guys.

edit
solved it using the bulldozer method. Reinstalled, repartitioned. It mounts automatically now.