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please could you help, I recently installed Ubuntu 18.10 on my windows 10 machine without configuring the UEFI settings on windows,upon installing ubuntu I opted for something-else in the installation menu as not to format or loose my windows files and documents,

I then created a 40 Gig partition in which to run Ubuntu 18.10, everything went fine or so I thought until I restarted the machine and realized that i could no longer boot into windows nor did I get an option as to boot into Windows or Ubuntu, but instead Ubuntu would just load on start-up.

Basically I can no longer boot into Windows after the installation and am extremely worried and stressed as all my important files and documents are on the windows OS, as a matter of fact I hadn't imported nor saved any of my files to the Ubuntu OS which is currently file-less,

furthermore i did try a command in the terminal as see if Grub would fix my boot problem regarding my windows OS which did not solve the problem, i further tried to view the available partitions in the terminal however my windows partitions would not show,this is what lsblk returns in the terminal

e@E-PC:~$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 298.1G  0 disk 
└─sda1   8:1    0 298.1G  0 part /
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  
e@E-PC:~$

PLEASE could you help me, I really need to recover and use the files on my windows OS.

Organic Marble
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Elvis C
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    Depending on what you did in the 'something else' install it could be good or bad news. It is certainly possible that you blew away your windows install. Much more information is needed to help, you could start by [edit] ing your question and include the output of lsblk. – Organic Marble Feb 06 '19 at 21:59
  • thanks for the response, Im not to clued up about linux systems thus i am assuming lsblk is a command i should run in the terminal? – Elvis C Feb 06 '19 at 22:15
  • That's right. It will give a very high level look at what partitions are on your system. – Organic Marble Feb 06 '19 at 22:17
  • this what the command returned in my terminal, – Elvis C Feb 06 '19 at 22:19
  • e@E-PC:~$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 0 298.1G 0 disk └─sda1 8:1 0 298.1G 0 part / sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
    e@E-PC:~$     – Elvis C Feb 06 '19 at 22:20
  • Please [edit] your question and include this information. It's too hard to read in this format as a comment. – Organic Marble Feb 06 '19 at 22:21
  • please forgive me as i am new to Ubuntu as well as the forum as this is my first post, I have now edited my question. – Elvis C Feb 06 '19 at 22:53
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    No problem, thanks for editing your question. The bad news is that this shows only one partition on your hard drive, sda1, and it is the Ubuntu system directory, /. Based on this information I would say that you erased your hard drive when you installed Ubuntu. The Windows information may be recoverable but that's a very technical subject and beyond me. I hope you had your Windows computer backed up. – Organic Marble Feb 06 '19 at 22:58
  • no i did not back up my data, is there possibly a software i could use to retrieve my windows data and if i was to uninstall ubuntu would i be able to use/boot into windows without my files? – Elvis C Feb 06 '19 at 23:10
  • Your last comment shows, well, that you shouldn't be installing OSes because you lack the basic understanding about what should be done. Right now you should be concerned with data recovery (personal files only, of course, because the Windows OS and programs can be easily reinstalled) and that alone won't be easy and those files overwritten by the Ubuntu installation are gone, you may have a chance with the ones that weren't. (->) –  Feb 07 '19 at 01:13
  • (->) In summary, NEVER mess with partitions containing files that you need without backing them up first and learn the basics of partitions, OSes installations, bootloaders, the difference between UEFI and Legacy (BIOS) and their specific requirements, etc. because attempting again. –  Feb 07 '19 at 01:13
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    Immediately turn off the computer and boot from a Live USB session and then you can use something like testdisk or photorec to recover some of the files that may be left over. However, you will lose the filenames (all recovered files get new numbered names so you will have to search file by file to see what is recovered) and you will have to search for files by file extension. Now is a better time than any to learn data forensics. Also, make sure you have an extra spare usb drive to store the recovered data. https://askubuntu.com/questions/3883/how-to-recover-deleted-files – mchid Feb 07 '19 at 04:49
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    Also, see this post on how to get a windows recovery image from microsoft: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Operating-System-and-Recovery/Reinstalling-Windows-10-OS-after-Replacing-Hard-Drive/m-p/5274165/highlight/true#M317450 – mchid Feb 07 '19 at 04:50
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    Here is the testdisk homepage https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk – mchid Feb 07 '19 at 04:53
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    Also, you will need to install testdisk after you boot up the USB: sudo apt update; sudo apt install testdisk – mchid Feb 07 '19 at 04:55
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    As mentioned, Testdisk is your best hope of salvaging your data files as they have been clearly wiped. The less you use your hard drive the better the success of some recovery. Other than that you could take your disk to a professional forensic recovery service, who specialise in this kind of issue, but they don't come cheap. – Paul Benson Feb 07 '19 at 05:35
  • It happens to the best of us. I did the same thing on my first UEFI laptop (windows 8 professional completely lost) and I was a seasoned linux user by that time with 4 OSes on my old laptop and at least two on every other computer I could get my hands on at the time. Fortunately, we learn from our mistakes, even though it can be frustrating :) – mchid Feb 08 '19 at 03:10

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if you run gparted, does it still show the ntfs partition? If it is still entact, you may not have lost anything and can possibly use a second hard drive to install and recover your files. If that works, it may simply be a BIOS setting to boot to UEFI verses legacy. I had this happen when creating a dual boot, but the problem was that the USB was not compatible with the partition that windows was in, so it created Ubuntu as a legacy partition

Kevin C
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