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I just installed Ubuntu first time. I was checking instructions on the Internet about how to install. Someone said to use the second option i.e erase disk and install. I got idea that it will delete only windows partition but everything is gone now and i have two partitions now. Root n home respectively. I have lost extremely important data. Is there anyway that i can recover it. I really need it. Please help me now.

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    Start the Ubuntu Installer, select try Ubuntu, Download qphotorec. Select the drive you want to recover and where you want to recover all the data too, pray to our Human Deity, and and hope you get everything back. And, let this be a lesson: ALWAYS BACKUP.
    – blade19899
    Sep 29, 2015 at 15:57
  • @blade19899 Under the circumstances (high value data, inexperienced user), I would not recommend that the OP attempts recovery himself as the risk of mistakes is high, and costly. Sep 29, 2015 at 16:04

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BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE, turn off the machine (using the hard power switch, not by shutting it down) containing the hard drive which you want to recover data from, and do not turn it back on again until you know what you are doing. Any OS or software you run from that hard drive has the potential to further corrupt your data while it runs.

Whether or not any of the data is recoverable will depend on a number of factors. Essentially it boils down to, (a) where on the hard drive the data is stored, and (b) whether or not the Ubuntu installation process (and anything you ran subsequently) overwrote that data with new data.

There is plenty of software out there which is designed for recovering lost data. However, because you said that the data is extremely important and because of your lack of experience (which I'm assuming, due to the fact that you thought "erase disk" would preserve partitions), I would suggest that you don't attempt any data recovery yourself and instead contact a specialist data recovery company. Get a quote, and decide whether or not the cost is justified by the value to you of your data.

If you do decide to attempt data recovery yourself, do not do so using any OS or software running on the drive itself. Ideally you want to mount the drive in read only mode in a OS running from some other medium (e.g. CD, second hard drive, USB drive, etc.).

Click here for a list of data recovery software, and in particular a list of live distributions that are geared towards data recovery.

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One of the tools i can recomend you is photorec however i would recommend this tool only if you plan on getting back non common files since if you try to recover files like pictures this tool will retrieve a lot of junk data like thumbnails of websites you visited years ago and will consume your disk space really quick, also please keep in mind not all data can be saved in the case something else was rewritten; i would recomend that if you have an external hard drive to store the files being recovered there, and as i was pointed out on the comments, it is a good idea to use a live cd or a live usb just to avoid the corruption of other files while the recovery takes place. with that in mind lets begin. To install you would need the package testdisk on a terminal type

sudo apt-get install testdisk

to run the program you simply type on the terminal

photorec

you will need to choose in which hard drive you want to recover from select the one you want and the just press enter on proceed, afterwards you will be asked to choose from which partition and at the bottom you will have 4 options you can access them by using the arrows left and right and pressing enter as i would recomend to go to [file opt] so you can specify what type of file you want to recover and then go over search so the program can look for it.

Afterwards you will be asked what kind of partition the files were stored, for windows they usually are NTFS partitions so you will need to choose the second option, then you will be asked if you want to check only the unallocated space this works only with ext3/ext4 so you will need to choose the [whole] option.

For last you will be asked where you want to save the information you only need to choose the folder --Tip you can also cd, on to the folder where you want to save, before running photorec so that way at this point will show the current directory and you dont have to navigate.

I wish you luck.

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    You should make clear in the answer that the OP should not attempt any of this from within his Ubuntu installation on the drive he wants to recover from. He needs to do it from a live disc. Sep 29, 2015 at 16:21

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