Newbie Help!!

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Author
Kriko
Posts: 1
Joined: 05 Sep 2014, 09:59

Newbie Help!!

#1 Post by Kriko »

Hard Drive Troubles.

Ok so I had a Dell laptop with Windows XP running, I thought I'd try Ubuntu so stuck that on there too, running alongside windows. All working fine Linux boot selector at start-up with choice of Ubuntu or Windows.

Ubuntu soon asked me to upgrade from 12.0 to 13. ??? possibly. Not enough space so reaching for my trusty Partition Magic , resized all the partitions (the drive was split into c:, d:, and E, and moved the free space to the Linux partition. Did this all in one go (probably a mistake !!)

Linux would start but not windows, but the selection was there for it. Tried using FIXBOOT and FIXMBR but not sure what order.

Widows disappears from the choices at boot up!

I have NOW imaged this disk and have tried a few things but without any luck.

The original C; drive is gibberish and isn't seen as a valid disk windows asks if I want to repair it (haven't tried that yet)

D: drive is OK and data is there.
E: drive is OK and data is there

Primary partition (Boot) is seen as FAT12, I'm pretty certain it was NTFS previously.

Before I broke it I had taken a VM Workstation VM of the machine and I can use it through VM Workstation, but I'd like it on the Laptop again. If I can't rescue it with TestDisk is there a way I can restore the VM to the physical?


Thanks, Mark

Oh I have removed the disk from the laptop and have connected it via USB to my computer.

I also have a spare disk to use as test system.

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