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Linux overwrote everything...
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If it actually overwrote the data you're screwed. Once data has been overwritten it is realistically impossible to restore.
Chalk it up to experience.........any time you mess with your installation of your OS you should back up important data.
Chalk it up to experience.........any time you mess with your installation of your OS you should back up important data.
Remove the hard drive or try not to do too many writes to it. Use software, such as FinalData and you might be able to recover something.
Quote:
Original post by sathenzar
Linux just overwrote my primary hd when I told it to install on the secondary hd. I just lost 5 months of work. Is there anyway to restore the data? I don't know of any ways...thanks.
How'd the kernel do that? More likely than not, your distributions either installer or partitian manager erased it, unless you were installing LFS.
now before you go into Screwed mode what kind of work did you lose, and did the installer change the partitians or did it just overwrite the bootloader?
How about not blaming the computer. You wrote over your primary hard drive.
Quote:
Original post by sanguineraven
Remove the hard drive or try not to do too many writes to it. Use software, such as FinalData and you might be able to recover something.
Or you could just give me your $80 and I will provide the same level of data recovery that you will achieve.
Well good news :) when I tried to reinstall Vista, it gave me atopic.asp?topic_id=406449 warning saying a previous installation of windows was found. But when I boot into it the hd it says GRBU failed or something like that. Then when I boot into my secondary hd and go into linux, it won't let me mount the 320 GB hd. It just gives me an error everytime.
Any ideas? Maybe there is some hope left.
Thanks.topic.asp?topic_id=406449
Any ideas? Maybe there is some hope left.
Thanks.topic.asp?topic_id=406449
Time to put the Phillips-Head away and buy a Gateway.
remove your HD, put it in another computer with a working OS. Take off all the important data. Then put the HD back in your system and put in your OS disc. It should give you an option to restore your boot loader without overwriting data.
So which distro did you install, anyways? Like the others have said, it sounds it's just the bootloader that's been overwritten, and not your previous OS. I think it's common for GRUB to detect Windows installations and add them to the boot list during installation (Does Ubuntu do it? I haven't installed it in a while, but I can't remember adding Windows myself).
Even if it hasn't, you can still boot into Linux and learn how to change it.
Even if it hasn't, you can still boot into Linux and learn how to change it.
Just boot into your Linux installation (using GRUB) and append this:
Changing hd0,2 for the appropriate partition of your Windows boot partition (usually the main one). hd0,2 means the third partition on the first hard drive. Yours may be, and probably is, different.
Then reboot and you should see a Windows XP.
Alternatively you could just use the boot prompt on GRUB (you access it by pressing 'b' when on the GRUB screen IIRC, it says onscreen anyway) and run the commands I listed above (excluding the 'title' lines) followed by 'boot'
Most distributions wouldn't install over something unless you explicitly told it to do so.
title Windows XProotnoverify (hd0,2)makeactivechainloader +1Changing hd0,2 for the appropriate partition of your Windows boot partition (usually the main one). hd0,2 means the third partition on the first hard drive. Yours may be, and probably is, different.
Then reboot and you should see a Windows XP.
Alternatively you could just use the boot prompt on GRUB (you access it by pressing 'b' when on the GRUB screen IIRC, it says onscreen anyway) and run the commands I listed above (excluding the 'title' lines) followed by 'boot'
Most distributions wouldn't install over something unless you explicitly told it to do so.
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