Wubi - Installation deleted?

Question

Ok, I think I already know the answer to this one, but it's important I try a bit more.

I have been using a wubi installation of xubuntu for about a month, keeping my windows installation for some data I needed.

It's been working fine until this morning when I got to the usual boot menu, but trying to boot into xubuntu simply sent me to the grub screen. Imagining it was something broken in the mbr or similar I booted into a sysrescue cd that I knew would come in handy and booted into an xfce session. I mounted my windows partition and found that the disk I was expecting to find at /mnt/windows/ubuntu/... was gone. There was simply nothing there.

It's not a pain to re-install ubuntu, and I am now intending to ditch windows permanently (or possibly keep it on a small partition for testing), but I had about 2 days work of solid project on the drive, which I hadn't backed up because I was working on it as a test, and hadn't realised how much there was until it was gone. Is there any way I can get this back? If I knew roughly what data would be on the disk then I could find it and undelete it? I haven't booted into windows or done any IO, so I'm holding out hope and not formatting the disk (yet)

Answer 1

I had this issue once. The files got sent to the found.id (e.g. found.000) directory. Does it exist (check that there is no hiding enabled)? If yes, some recovery software might be able to restore the files. If not, try running chkdisk and look again. Is it there now? If not, most likely there is no way to restore it.

I suggest installing properly next time. This is a known downside to Wubi.

Some software that might be able to recover the files (although the chances are pretty slim):

• http://www.piriform.com/recuva
• http://www.easeus.com/download.htm (if I remember right, this restored my disks)

Most likely will not help:

• http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/chkmate.htm
• http://www.ericphelps.com/uncheck/