Help with hard disk recovery (linux content)

I'm posting on behalf of a friend ... so hopefully one of you bright souls out there has an answer for him! And, yes, I know this may not be the right forum, but I want to see if I can't get Linux and Windows input. Plus, I'm a super mod so

This is what he says happened:

Looks to me as though the Linux installer wiped his MBR clean. I would hope that it didn't get a chance to overwrite many (or any) of the files. My guess would be to look toward some kind of recovery software ... however I am not familiar with that. Anyone's experience or ideas would be greatly appreciated. If you need any extra information, please do let me know as I can find out more details.

Thanks,

David

 

Use the Ubuntu LiveCD to view and recover the stuff on his Vista partition.

 

Thanks for the response, pixelot.

He can run a liveCD. He's using the aforementioned Mandriva. It does mount the drives but only shows those three Linux partitions. That's why I'm wondering if there's something out there that will allow him to actually look at the data and perhaps recover it in some fashion or create a new MBR recursively somehow.

 

So in a partition manager (i.e. GParted) does he see the rest as unallocated/unformated?

Or is it just unable to mount as a drive?

 

Mkay, working on getting GParted now. (He's in a different dorm than me so kind of touch-and-go regarding communication) I do have to ask--where is this going? What if the partitions show up as he reports (two linux files and one swap)? Is there any hope?

 

Not much, AFAIK (I accidentally started wiping my Vista partition, too). The only other thing to try is booting from the Vista disk, and see if it even recognizes the installation, but if you can't see the files from another OS, there's not much hope that the installation can be repaired; pretty much the best thing to do is see if you can open the filesystem from some other OS, such as this Mandriva. About GParted, I was just curious as to what all that Vista space is doing now, as you can't access it as a drive. It looks bad.

 

Thanks for the help .. I've got a screenshot of GParted, but Vista can't see the files .. Mandriva shows the same partitions and cannot open them so I think he might be out of luck.

 

Yeah, I'm afraid wiping a partition doesn't seem to take much.

 

Yes you can recover your data using data recovery software which is best option. These data recovery software recover data from deleted partition and give you data back. Few month ago i was facing same problem then i have tried stellar phoenix linux recovery software which recovered my formatted data. You can also try this or search over google for recovery software.