An error occurred in the partitioning stage of an Ubuntu 10.10 installation on my computer that caused me to restart and now all of my other partitions are gone.
Is there a way to recover these files?
It is possible that your partition table was corrupted but your partitions are still there.
There is a tool available in the Ubuntu LiveCD called gpart that can recover your partition table.
http://www.brzitwa.de/mb/gpart/index.html
Load the Live CD, install it (sudo apt-get install gpart
) and then run gpart
.
There is a good explanation of how to do this at the Ubuntu wiki: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery#Lost Partition
It explains how to use the gpart tool, as well as a utility called testdisk.
There's a great article on the same subject, including data recovery, at UbuntuGeek: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15761/recover-data-like-a-forensics-expert-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd/