Installed Ubuntu and it corrupted my Windows partition, how do I get the data back?

Question

Its the weirdest thing or so I thought until I found that it has happened before.

I tried to use testdisk to rebuild the MBR but instead it deleted the partition, but not the data which its currently in a 100GB or so portion of unallocated disk space.

Testdisk says it can't restore the partition, no problem I dont care about windows but I need to get those files back.

What can I do?

Answer 1

I disagree with the comment that a lost partition is lost data. Partitions will lose you your filenames but your files should be safe if they're in a protected, unallocated space on your disk.

I suggest you run something like PhotoRec (part of testdisk) over the unpartitioned space. You can do this from within Ubuntu fairly safely because there's no chance (that I can see) that you're going to accidentally overwrite your old data.

Failing that there are other tools. I had a very positive experience with Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional about a decade ago. Saved my bacon but it wasn't cheap.

Answer 2

Not much, if you're confident in the size of the partitions you can recreate them and get your data back, though I wouldn't do that without backing up the entire image first. This really isn't an Ubuntu question. You would be better served by jumping on the test disk mailing lists: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Support .