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Hello and thank you for any help.

I have a Lenovo Yoga 11s and I wanted to try out using Ubuntu on it. I have used Linux a little bit in the past, but I would still consider myself a complete novice at it.

I went through the process of making the bootable USB drive and also made a separate partition for me to install Ubuntu on. Somehow I must have selected an option that wiped the whole drive and installed Ubuntu instead of just on the partition I had made. (I installed 14.04 if that helps)

So once that happened, I tried using the Lenovo recovery button, called "OneKey", on my computer but that just takes me to the "GRUB" menu that has Ubuntu options. I have checked the hard drive and it appears that there are no longer any Windows partitions present.

The hard drive partitions that I see on GParted are:

  • sda1, fat32, /boot/efi, size: 512MiB, used: 4.36MiB
  • sda2, ext4, size: 114.86GiB, used: 10.82GiB
  • sda3, linux-swap, size:3.88Gib, used: 4.00 KiB

I don't really have any crucial data that was on there, but I just want to have a working copy of Windows available for use since that is what I am most comfortable with.

I tried calling Lenovo support but they said that I would have to buy a recovery disc, which costs $70.

Please let me know if there is any other information that I could give you to further assist me.

Thank you!

user310436
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2 Answers2

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As far as I know the Ubuntu installer has issues detecting a Windows installation on an EFI based machine (Windows 8 requires EFI, pretty sure the Yoga series is Win8 only?), therefore it doesn't give you the "Install alongside Windows" option any more and you have to do the whole partitions it should use etc. thing manually. If you don't Ubuntu will wipe your drive and create a new partition table.

Long story short:

You could try one of these:

http://www.howtoforge.com/data_recovery_with_testdisk

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/recovering.html

How to recover a deleted NTFS partition with data

But I'm afraid you'll have to pay the 70 bucks.. Something similar happened to me (Lenovo G500) and I couldn't get anything back (hate Win8 anyways and still have an old Win7 DVD lying around, so..)

Community
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sveinki
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Yeah, I've had this problem. It looks like you are correct and the windows and recovery sector of your hard drive are both gone. One option, I guess, would be to make the laptop a dedicated Linux machine?

Typing windows 8 (or 7) recovery disk into amazon seems to give some options that are around $10. Does anyone have experience getting these to work?

Theoretically there is a way you can make the recovery disk before you accidentally destroy your windows partition though I've never gotten it to work. Makes me miss the mid 2000s when they just shipped a recovery disk with all new computers.

ohnoplus
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