/home partition deleted after installing windows 10

Question

I had the following partition organization

Disk 1 (HD 500GB)

100MB (Windows recovery partition) primary

100GB (Windows partitions) primary

Extended Partition:

• 100GB ext4 linux partition (/home)

• 300GB NTFS partition (data partition)

Disk 2 (SSD 32GB)

32GB ext4 linux parition (/)

GRUB is in the SSD, so after installing windows 10, GRUB was working fine. But then, when I tried to boot Ubuntu, it gave me a message saying it couldn't mount my /home partition.

Here's my fdisk -l output

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006ca4d

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          206848   208795647   104294400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       208795648   209717247      460800   27  Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda4       209719294   976768064   383524385+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5       422156133   976768064   277305966    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
Partition 5 does not start on physical sector boundary.

Disk /dev/sdb: 32.0 GB, 32017047552 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3892 cylinders, total 62533296 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e8e86

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            2048    62531583    31264768   83  Linux

Answer 1

My case was not that lucky. I have two HDD, one for win10 and the other for Ubuntu Gnome. Had to shut down in Windows the powercord-off way, and after restoring itself, it wiped out not only the MBR, but also two partitions! Luckily I had /home on the last partition (/dev/sdX6), so the damage wasn´t that catastrophic for me.

I recommend to mount /home in any partition located after the first one (/, /tmp, swap or however your layout is). And also be sure to create it as a primary partition, not extended. Just in case.

Answer 2

What I had to do is boot Gparted and repair with gpart and fsck.ext4. I basically had to blow out the partition table, build a new EXT 4 (which is probably what happened to you) and then restore the filesystem. Gparted was good for this.