Lost all my partition after installing Ubuntu 14.4 LTS

Question

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with a bootable pendrive. Before that I had 3 partitions on my windows system (C:, D:, and E:). During the installation process I thought it would be the same as windows where it formats the C: drive and that Linux gets installed in C:. I chose the second option where it said erase disk and install Ubuntu.

Now I cannot find any of my drives. I have read hundreds of threads in this forum and tons of youtube tutorial to retrieve it by using testdisk but could not figure it out. When I use it with liveUSB it shows two storage systems. When I run (disks) from the application the result shows:

Disk Drives:
500gb Hard disk
Hitachi HTS727550A9E364
Size:500gb 
Partitioning : Master Boot record
Device: /dev/sda1
Partition Type : Linux Bootable
Contents : Ext2(version 1.0) not mounted

And below Disk Drives section there is Other Devices which has:

491GB block device
8.5gb block device
967mb loop device

And when I run fdisk -l it shows:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00045999

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      499711      248832   83  Linux
/dev/sda2          501758   976771071   488134657    5  Extended
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5          501760   976771071   488134656   8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root: 491.3 GB, 491333353472 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 59734 cylinders, total 959635456 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-swap_1: 8464 MB, 8464105472 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1029 cylinders, total 16531456 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-swap_1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/sdb: 15.9 GB, 15925772288 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15188 cylinders, total 31105024 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x20ac7dda

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   ?  3224498923  3657370039   216435558+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb2   ?  3272020941  5225480974   976730017   16  Hidden FAT16
/dev/sdb3   ?           0           0           0   6f  Unknown
/dev/sdb4        50200576   974536369   462167897    0  Empty

Partition table entries are not in disk order

How do I recover my partitions?

Answer 1

similar questions is alredy been answered here Recover 1TB disk erased with startup disk creator and How do I recover my accidentally lost Windows partitions after installing Ubuntu?

Boot from a live CD or USB.

Install TestDisk and Mount the drive then open a terminal and run

 sudo testdisk 

follow these steps

here you have to select your hard disk.

Deeper Search (this should find your old partition, you can stop it after it found it)

Once you found what you think it's your partition select it with up/down arrows

[P] for list files and look if it seems it

[q] to quit list files

I have changed pictures for better understanding. This is from wiki link at bottom

Using the left/right arrow keys, change the status of the selected partition from D(eleted) to L(ogical). This way you will be able to recover this partition

[enter] continue

When all partitions are available and data correctly listed, you can select Write to save the partition structure.

more detailed step by step instructions for TestDisk data recovery can be found here http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step and here http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-data-recovery.html