recovery of data after installing ubuntu 12 [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Formatted and lost 6 years worth of photo memories.. any way to get this back?
Installed Ubuntu over windows

i had been using ubuntu paralally with windows before.this time i had only win 7 and i decided to replace it with ubuntu thinking that it will retain the data on other drives(the ones in which windows was not installed..)

seems like my entire disk has been erased and taken over by this new system.

how can i get my data back? (preferably not wanting to switch back to windows)

Answer 1

If you selected "use entire disk" for the install, then your drive was re-partitioned and reformatted. There's no easy way to get any of your data back.

There may still be data there in the form of a data stream, but the indexes to the files will be missing. The more you use the drive the more it gets written to, and the less of that stream there will be to recover. Recovery operations would start with mounting the drive as read only and searching for any indication of the old partition table and allocation tables for the files. You could also pay someone to recover the data but it may not be cheap.