recover data lost during Ubuntu installation

Question

I have a drive of 250 gb which i had partitioned into two. 180 gb had a lot of music. It was my lifetime's collection of music. the other 50 gb had windows installed in it and also had Ubuntu 12.10 on it. Now, I uninstalled Ubuntu using wubi and now tried to install ubuntu 13.04.

I selected 7 gb of partition during the installation for ubuntu and 1 gb for swap data. I remember vividly when I was doing the partition, i selected the new partition table option and it showed me 250 gb. I re-partitioned it to 7 gb and added one more gb for swap data. After installing, i have lost the entire 250 gb of data. all my music and windows 7 also is gone. When i go to disks and check, there is a 242 gb of unallocated space shown. I really really want my data as it contains a lot of music and im a musician.

I tried testdisk and it didnt recover anything. Can you guys help? I'm desperate here.

Testdisk/Photorec should be able to at least recover parts of your data: See this question for some details but you will also have to follow the concise guide from GCSecurity very closely. — Takkat, Apr 29 '13 at 12:20
if its so much important data, you should have it backed up on some external drive as well...... — Qasim, Apr 29 '13 at 13:28

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 29 '13 at 12:40

Lost Partition

If you made a mistake while partitioning and the partition no longer appears in the partition table, so long as you have not written data in that space, all your data is still there.

GNU Parted

Run Parted from the command line to recover your partition.

When changing the partition table on your hard drive, you must ensure that no partition on the disk is mounted. This includes swap space. The easiest way to accomplish this is to run the live cd. Parted is installed on the base Ubuntu system. Once at the desktop, open a terminal and run_:

sudo swapoff -a

Next run parted and tell it to use the device in question. For example, if your /dev/sda drive is the drive from which you want to recover, run:

sudo parted /dev/sda

Then, use the rescue option:

rescue START END

where Start is the area of the disk where you believe the partition began and END is its end. If parted finds a potential partition, it will ask you if you want to add it to the partition table.

recover data lost during Ubuntu installation

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