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I am a beginner in Ubuntu, so please help me to solve this problem. I bought a new laptop with a hard disk of 500 GB. First I installed windows 7 and allocated 400 GB for that. Now I installed Ubuntu using the windows installer with a USB pen drive in the 100 GB left for that. It worked perfectly. But I faced a problem when I reinstalled my Windows 7 OS. I am now unable to get the dual boot process back. I tried to re-install Ubuntu, too. But when I tried to do that using the windows installer, I am not able to find the partitioned space of 100 GB already containing Ubuntu OS. It shows only the space wich is allocated for Windows.

This is my problem. Now what should I do to get the dual boot back?

Adaephon
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user260124
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    Hi user 260124, I think you have to find out if the Windows installer took the whole disk and overwrote your Ubuntu installation. If not, follow the link of Danatela, otherwise you will have to do a reinstall "alongside" or repartition manually. – Jacob Vlijm Mar 20 '14 at 08:20
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    @Danatela If Ubuntu's "Windows installer" was used--i.e., Wubi--then the solutions there do not apply (and may even be dangerous). Wubi doesn't install GRUB to the MBR, so reinstalling GRUB to the MBR won't help but would likely make it so Windows wouldn't boot either. user260124: Did you have any important files such as documents in your Ubuntu system, that you must recover? If so, please read the caution at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery, edit with more info. – Eliah Kagan Mar 21 '14 at 03:35
  • @EliahKagan, I was confused by "another partition". Can the Wubi install something to another partition? I thought it installs inside Windows. – Danatela Mar 21 '14 at 03:43
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    @Danatela Wubi doesn't make a new partition but it can be used to install in any NTFS partition, and sometimes people make the mistake of making an NTFS partition for a new Wubi system instead of just installing Ubuntu the regular way. Also, I don't think we know for sure if a 100 GB partition ever really existed; the question is ambiguous in describing this part (we don't know what "allocated" means). Without clarification from the author I think we just don't know quite what happened. – Eliah Kagan Mar 21 '14 at 03:47

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I recommend you start by checking if you still have your Ubuntu installation on disk (as suggested by Jacob). You may have overwritten that when you re-installed Windows.

To verify, please boot either to Ubuntu Live CD or Live USB and run gparted. This will show you the partitions you have on your disk. You can see an example on this page with both NTFS (Windows) and ext3 / ext4 (Linux) partitions.

If you still have your Ubuntu partition, you can use boot repair to restore your dual boot configuration (Ubuntu bootloader).

Community
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Eero Aaltonen
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  • +1. You can improve your answer by adding a couple screenshots of Gparted showing the difference between disk allocation in cases of one partition and two partitions – Danatela Mar 21 '14 at 03:57
  • @Danatela unfortunately I am also using both Bitlocker and crypt-luks, so a screenshot from my laptop would probably be more confusing. However I added a link to one source. Please feel free to suggest edits, if you have an example image. – Eero Aaltonen Mar 21 '14 at 08:23