New
#1
How can I recover my lost Windows 7 partition after installing Ubuntu?
So the other day I decided that I wanted to try dual-booting Ubuntu 10.04 on my HP Pavilion dv7-4083cl Entertainment Notebook that already had Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit installed. I shrank the main (biggest) partition by 100Gigs and then installed Ubuntu 10.04 on that 100Gigs of unallocated space. All worked fine, except when I tried to boot Windows 7 from the grub menu, it would come up to the beginning Windows 7 animation and then it would crash. So, I downloaded a Windows 7 Recovery CD and tried a few of the tools there. I did not create a system recover image prior to my troubles, so I could not recover the easy way.
After that, I tried the Startup Repair tool, which did not work. I read somewhere to try that Startup Repair tool 2 or 3 times, which I did. The third time, it seemed to freeze; it was "working" for about 6 hours, at which point I decided that it was enough and shut down the PC. That was a mistake... From that point forward, I still could not boot into Windows, but also every time I tried to boot into Ubuntu, I had to perform a disk check, which always failed! After trying that a few times, I had had enough yet again and decided to just reinstall Ubuntu. The install seemed to work fine, but once I rebooted I could not boot into Ubuntu (or Windows 7). No matter what option I select from the grub menu (or if I push F11 to go into recovery partition), it gives me an error that says "Error: No such partition" and dumps me into a grub rescue prompt...
After releasing multiple bouts of turrets, I tried booting from my Ubuntu LiveUSB again (same one I installed Ubuntu with twice) and ran Gparted to look at my partitions. It only showed me the one 100Gig partition and said the remaining ~350Gigs were unallocated! So now I'm stuck with no bootable operating system (on my HD), and to top it off, HP just sent me their "official" recovery disks that are trying to reformat my HD and erase all my data...
I know there has to be a way to restore my partitions and replace the grub bootloader with the Windows 7 bootloader. At this point I don't care about Ubuntu at all. All of my data was on the Windows 7 partition (which I cannot access from Ubuntu to grab it).
Someone please help! I can provide any information that you need, but remember that I can only do so via either BIOS or by booting Ubuntu from the LiveUSB. I cannot access Windows 7. I also do not have a Windows 7 install disk as this was a refurbished HP laptop that I bought from Costco...
-Rob Pennington