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I have 2 major problems.

  1. I can't boot Windows 7.
    I have Windows 7 Home Premium. I had removed one of the Windows recovery partition during installation. But when I researched it showed that that isn't a problem. And there were 2 recovery partitions and when I tried to boot from the startup menu from the main Windows 7 option and the recovery option it took me to the startup repair.

  2. I can't find my WINDOWS partition.
    I used to see it for a week and I'm not sure if it disappeared after updating Ubuntu or when I tried to boot Windows and if it encrypted the hard drive. And I'm pretty sure that I didn't have 600 GB free (image attached).

Please help me since I have my families photos, especially my childhood ones since this is an old laptop.

Disk Partitions

1 Answers1

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Where it says "Assessment: SELF-TEST FAILED", this is a good indication that your hard drive is failing S.M.A.R.T. tests which generally means that the drive itself will not last long and parts may already be unreadable.

Windows 7 would have been installed to an NTFS partition. Ubuntu can read and write to valid NTFS partitions without need for any additional software. If you had a valid mountable NTFS partition at this location, it would be listed as NTFS and it would be mountable.

However, what I see is that you have "Free Space".

"Free Space" existing where there should be a partition is not a common symptom of drive failure. "Free Space" means there is no partition at this location. It's likely that you mistakenly deleted this partition somehow. So this could be a separate issue from the pending hard drive failures.

Right now, since you are getting the drive failure flags, and you have suggested that you have important data on the drive but have failed to keep appropriate backups, my suggestion is that you stop using the disk immediately and take it to a professional data recovery technician

At the very least you might be able to image (copy) the disk to another disk in case this one fails.

You do have a few limited options to try to find lost data on your own, but you risk further damage to your drive if you're not careful, and the failure of S.M.A.R.T tests adds in an additional unknown factor of continued drive failures.

I will say that trying to recover files after the file system or partition has been deleted is usually not successful.

Here is some further reading if you want to go down the path of trying to recover data from a deleted partition or broken file system:

Unable to mount NTFS external hard drive

Fix corrupt NTFS partition without Windows

And in the future: Back up. Back up. Back up. Hard drives are considered "consumable". They do not last forever and most hard drives have an advertised lifespan of 3-5 years, even though they often last for longer.

Nmath
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