How can I recover my lost Windows 7 partition after installing Ubuntu?

[robpennington84]

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

 

[profdlp]

Try TestDisk Download - CGSecurity (free) and see if it can find and recover your lost partition.

 

[theog]

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/116098-dual-boot-windows-7-ubuntu.html?ltr=D

 

[Mark Phelps]

One of my regular complaints on the Ubuntu Forums is about how Canonical changed the installer to NOW make it really easy to accidentally reformat your Windows OS installation when trying to install Ubuntu. From what I can tell, that has resulted in no improvements to the installer.

You could try checking with HP to see what it would take to get recovery DVD(s) -- that will at least allow you to get a working Win7 install again.

As to recovering files, I've had really good results over the years with Runtime Software stuff -- but that requires a Windows PC to install and run them. You may have to end up pulling your drive and connecting it to a Windows PC to do the file recovery.

 

[SIW2]

Try a free bootable app. with a nice easy GUI based partition undelete fuction.

Partition Wizard has one - so does paragon free rescue kit express.

 

[robpennington84]

Thank you all for the quick replies. I tried the free Partition Wizard software, and it seems to have worked! I did a full scan and LOTS of lost partitions showed up. After figuring out which 4 were mine, I restored those and then rebuilt the MBR. But, when I tried to repair boot.ini, it said that there was no bootable partition... I tried exiting and rebooting without the cd, and sure enough, nothing showed on the screen except for a message saying there was no bootable partition and to insert a bootable drive and press any key... Any suggestions?

 

[SIW2]

Ther is no boot.ini anymore - it went out with XP.

When you recovered your partitions - you needed to have at least one Primary , preferably the win 7 partition.

If it is primary, Make sure your win 7 partition is marked active, then run startup repair from 7 repair disc 2 or 3 times.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Ther is no boot.ini anymore - it went out with XP.

When you recovered your partitions - you needed to have at least one Primary , preferably the win 7 partition.

If it is primary, Make sure your win 7 partition is marked active, then run startup repair from 7 repair disc 2 or 3 times.

Hello robpennington84, welcome to Seven Forums!


You may find some useful information in this tutorial at the link below.

Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times

 

[robpennington84]

Ther is no boot.ini anymore - it went out with XP.

When you recovered your partitions - you needed to have at least one Primary , preferably the win 7 partition.

If it is primary, Make sure your win 7 partition is marked active, then run startup repair from 7 repair disc 2 or 3 times.

It worked! YAY! Thank you SOOOO much! I received the HP recovery disks the other day but did NOT want to run them since it would have deleted all my data. This worked like a charm!

BTW: I did not have to run startup repair from the win7 recovery disk. I actually tried that before and it sat there trying to repair for about 30 hours with no luck. Had to force a reboot. But, that could have possibly been because there was no active partition?

Thanks again! You ROCK!

 

[SIW2]

Glad it worked for you