cant fix grub 2 and gparted shows unallocated disk

Question

i have been dualbooting ubuntu 14.04 and windows xp, but some days ago, i saw on the grub 2 screen the partition windows rescue enviroment and i clicked it. after that, i saw the following:

no such partition 
entering grub rescue>

after that, anything i clicked on (ubuntu or win xp) would only display the same screen. i turned it off, and turned it on again but it wouldnt even display the grub menu, just the grub rescue. i thought i could fix it with my live usb (ubuntu 13.10), by downloading boot-repair, but the wifi administrator does not work, it only displays this:

vpn connections      >
(check mark) enable networking
edit connections

and, i entered to gparted trought my live usb and it only displays

unallocated 
149.05 GiB
partition   -     file system       - size
unallocated (!) - unallocated       -  149.05 GiB

can you help me to fix my laptop, im desperated! im on exam week and all of my homework, exam guides, and 17 gigs of photos from a trip to Florida and i cant lose anithing from there im on another laptop sorry for my bad eanglish, it is not my main language

Answer 1

If you're very very lucky, the problem is modest damage to your partition table, which FixParts will repair more-or-less automatically. See the program's documentation for details on how to use it.

If you're less lucky, you'll need to use TestDisk or something similar to recover your original partitions. This program actively scans for filesystems and creates a new partition table to hold anything it finds.

If you're unlucky, your filesystems have been partially or completely overwritten, in which case your only hope is to use PhotoRec or something similar to recover individual files. This process is almost certain to be tedious, and you may end up sorting through files to figure out what they are, since PhotoRec does a poor job of recovering filenames. Also, you must have another physical disk on which to store the recovered files.