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I had Windows 7 on my computer and wanted to install Ubuntu. I did not do manual partitioning. When I restarted the system, I found out that my drive was reformatted. Is there a way I can recover my files?

Jacob Vlijm
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user262261
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  • Like Marc told you this is a very very big problem you maybe could send the hard drive to a professional, but that will be very expensive.. Backups are the answer sorry.. – Meisie Mar 26 '14 at 15:34

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The short answer is "no".

The long answer is "yes but . . ." You've re-partitioned the drive with a different type of data structure (ext4) that Windows can't recognize, so the original partition table that tells an operating system what is data and where it is is gone, and some of the data has been overwritten by the new version of Ubuntu you've installed. Much of your original data is likely still on the hard disk, but there is no way to find it, and every time you use the drive for anything, even booting the computer from it, more of this remaining data that you can't get will be over-written. It is possible (but exceedingly difficult) to recover some of the data in situations like yours, but it's not something you can pick up with a quick Google search, and it's something that gets harder the more you use that computer. At the very least, you'll need another disk to boot from, perhaps a Live DVD like you installed Ubuntu from, or you could remove it from that computer and use it as a second drive in a different computer so you can read from it without writing to it.

As you can see, this is not going to be easy. Backup often!

Marc
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