How to recover Ubuntu data if it's installed inside Windows?

Question

I want to install Ubuntu inside Windows.

However, if Windows gets corrupted, how can data from the Ubuntu system be recovered?

= This is a Windows related question/problem and is there for off topic. And I would suggest to backup important data regardless of any possible future problem. = AU expects questions to be about real problems. — Rinzwind, Jan 22 '13 at 08:02
@eliah see the faq? "What kind of questions should I not ask here?
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page. " I can not interpret this in any other way. — Rinzwind, Jan 22 '13 at 10:54
@Rinzwind While I feel pretty sure this kind of question is on-topic and considered constructive, the OP has not provided critically important information about what situation* the question is about or what kind of recovery (e.g., getting the root.disk file after filesystem corruption, accessing its contents, or something else altogether). So I think it's time to close this as not a real question. DllFileMissing*: If you still want help with this, please provide more information; this could be reopened. — Eliah Kagan, Jan 25 '13 at 00:03

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 03 '14 at 22:31

5

The data can be recovered if Windows is unbootable but you can still access the filesystem. All of the data is stored inside of a filesystem image called C:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk.

Simply boot an Ubuntu livecd, mount the NTFS partition and then mount that image (sudo mount -o loop /path/to/root.disk /mnt), get to where you mounted it (/mnt if you used the above command) and backup your data.

If you cannot mount the root.disk and you suspect filesystem corruption, then you should do the following (the order is important):

Run chkdsk /r from Windows to fix any NTFS file system corruption
Mount and fsck the root.disk from a live CD in case there is ext3/4 corruption

If there is no file system corruption you can also access the root.disk from within Windows using ext2read

edited Oct 03 '14 at 22:31

bcbc

6,026

answered Jan 22 '13 at 10:58

ooa

657

You're missing an important details. You need to mount the Windows partition that contains the root.disk first, and then you need to mount the root.disk with the -o loop option. – bcbc Jan 22 '13 at 17:28
@bcbc Unless we have another question about this with more answer, you might consider posting an answer here. I mention this so many months later because I've just noticed a more recent question that's probably a duplicate of this one. – Eliah Kagan Oct 02 '14 at 22:55
@EliahKagan ok - I added a bit more info to this answer. – bcbc Oct 03 '14 at 22:34

How to recover Ubuntu data if it's installed inside Windows?

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