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OK, I've spectacularly failed at the Ubuntu installation process, and my new computer is now unusable. I realize that this is somewhat of a specialized case, but I'd really be extradinarily grateful for any help that can be provided. I will try to supply all the relevant details:

Basically, I started off wanting to install Ubuntu 13.10 alongside Windows 8. I set up a 30GB partition for the installation. I got an apparently common issue where the setup did not recognize Windows 8. I have been running the Ubuntu installation off of a USB drive.

In my attempts to install Ubuntu (which began with a "??? ???" error that I asked about on this site, and then once I was able to bypass that I got an errno 5 error), I had to launch and relaunch the installer several times. Each time I did so, I had to go to the following screen and manually set aside the 30GB partition.

Now, after I got the "??? ???" error for the umpteenth time, I noticed that it took me back to the screen shown in Image 1, but this time the operating system was detected, and that it was Ubuntu, and that the first option was to reinstall Ubuntu. Figuring that this was referring to the 30GB partition, I chose this option.

I got the errno 5 error again, meaning that no actual installation took place. But when I launched the installer again, I got the following screen:

Image 1: The faulty partitioning

enter image description here Previously, there had been a ~217GB partition, the partition containing my Windows 8, and the 30GB partition that I had been playing around with. But now it's the same partition.

Previously, when I launched Ubuntu from the USB, and then restarted my computer, the Boot Manager would show Windows 8 as the only boot option. Now, there are no boot options. I can still run Ubuntu by plugging in my USB.

Image 2: Boot manager doesn't show Windows.

enter image description here

Do I have any option of re-partitioning the 247GB so that I get my Windows 8 back? Or do I have no other choice but reinstalling Windows 8?

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  • boot ubuntu live usb,install gparted by running sudo apt-get install gpartedon terminal and then upload gparted screenshot. Nov 29, 2013 at 1:52
  • There are no Windows partitions on the HDD, so it looks like you'll need to reinstall. Nov 29, 2013 at 2:42

1 Answer 1

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Boot up off of a live CD and selecting Test Ubuntu or whatever it says then get your network card configured so you can get online. Then once you have access to the internet your going to want to install a program called testdisk. The program is awesome and it will find and recover your old partitions. You shouldn't have to reinstall windows, I have even used it to recover partions that had been formatted.

Lost Partition

If you made a mistake while partitioning and the partition no longer appears in the partition table, so long as you have not written data in that space, all your data is still there.

Installing Software while running from Live CD

Go to /etc/apt/sources.list file and uncomment every section, once done with that run apt-get update followed by apt-get install testdisk, can also do this for any other package your needing to install that is not on the live cd based system. Do not run apt-get dist-upgrade as the system will not be able to do the actually upgrades while running from a live cd. If your running from a USB key this will work for almost everything but might in fact fail for hal the kernel and the initrd image but should work for everything else.

Testdisk

Alternatively, the testdisk application should be able to recover your partition. Use apt-get to install the tesdisk package. Run testdisk and it will scan your computer for media (hard drives, sd cards and any other drives) and offer you a menu-driven way to recover your partition. If your not running it as root you will need to run it as follows:

sudo testdisk

Also do yourself a favor even if the drive your working on is not large or isn't quite damaged this process could take a long time to do its job. If for some reason the process was to stop, you would have to restart the whole thing over again. But When you start test disk you can have it create a log file and then it would continue from whereever it left off last time, you can do that by feeding it options like this:

testdisk /log /dev/sda

If your imaging the whole disk or if its just a single partition table

testdisk /log /dev/sda1

If your drive is really hosed and it turns into doing data recover there is another program called photorec that is part of testdisk, and again... awesome stuff, really powerful and have used both of these to save data for a lot of clients now over the years.

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