windows vista home premium won't boot.(NBR staff note: Now includes issues in Ubuntu)

To use PhotoRec: (this program will pull off any data it can find, even if the partition tables and master files tables are not accessible. However, it will assign new names to everything, so it iwll be a pain to hunt for what you want).

step 1: At the terminal type 'sudo /home/greg/Desktop/testdisk-6.9/linux/photorec_static' adjusting the path to wherever you extracted the program folder.



step 2: Enter the password you set & press enter when prompted with '[sudo] password for greg:'



step 3: Select your hard disk and press '[Proceed ]'



Step 4: Select 'Intel' then press enter



Step 5: Select the partition you wish to recover if it is listed. Otherwise, scroll up to 'D No Partition'. This will restore the whole disk.



Step 6: When told that 'PhotoRec needs to know the filesystem', select [ Other ] and hit enter.



Step 7: Select [Whole] Extract files from the whole partition' and press enter.

Step 8: You will recognize this screen from my screen shots listed for TestDisk. Proceed as I described there.

The only difference is that this time the files it find will be located in folders called "recup_dir1, recup_dir2, ect" and will be given new files names.

EDIT:

I'm not very knowledgable with linux so I'm not sure how you will get that permission. For me it opens just fine.. The best I can think of is to make sure you are logged in with the sudo rights in the terminal. Maybe someone more familiar with linux know what's to do?

PhotoRec goes fairly fast... You need to make sure the the drive is big enough to fit all the data it finds. I usually use an external drive for that. In your case the best you can do is make sure that it is going onto the partition /dev/sda1 as that is the largest partition you have. The image you gave in GParted states the mountpoint on that drive is: /media/disk-1 . I'm not sure what that is about, as I am not a linux buff... I'm sure someone here can tell you where to save it according to your partition setup..

 

Open up the terminal and use "cd" to change the directory to the directory you're having trouble opening beginning from the file system itself which is "/". When you open the terminal you're already at home, so if you wanted to open a folder that won't open without root permission then you can "su" to change to root and/or when you get into that directory you use "ls -a" to list all files there. I'm a little lost on why you don't have permissions to view that folder as you should be able to view it without root privileges and I'm not going to have you log into root unless it's dire.