How-To Geek

Ok...long story, with whining included.

So the computer wouldn't boot up anymore, the screen had lines on it (which should have been a big hint), safe modes wouldn't work, restore points didn't load, repair and recovery disks didn't work, everything kept erroring out and rebooting. After two days of trying everything I could think of and find, I located my Win 7 disks and tried to fix with that and that didn't work, leaving only the reinstall which I really didn't want to do. I gave up and started a reinstall but guess what, that errored out and wouldn't load. I tried it twice which I now reeeeaally wish I hadn't because my windows.old would be the original system. At this point I found an old HP PC Doctor disk which ran a bunch of low level tests and told me that something was haywire with the video card. Wish I had known that before starting the reinstalls... I bought a new card and it cleared up the video issues, but the Win 7 still didn't start. I got a Ubuntu ISO and booted off that. It loads fine, the computer works like a champ. So I can see the hard drive but both the windows and the windows.old are the two install attempts. All of the directories and files that I can see just look like your basic empty computer after initial install.

I know all my music and books and documents are sitting on the drive somewhere. The NTFS directory appears obliterated. Is there some other way to maybe recreate the directory? I really don't want to have to just reformat the drive so I can get WIN 7 to load. Yes I have a backup but it is from Aug 2010. After I shifted to 500GB disks I couldn't really make more backups as I would have needed TB of storage and at the time that was too expensive.

Oh... and my spousal unit is truly not happy right now.

Any uplifting thoughts?

The files that I want are not visible from Ubuntu. Documents folder is empty, downloads empty, pictures empty - all from the install attempt. Yes I tried the recovery cd, and I tried restoring to a bunch of different old checkpoints everything stopped dead and rebooted when it hit something related to the video issue. There are no checkpoints anymore once the new install started.

Recuva runs under windows. I can't get windows running. I only have Ubuntu running fine. I need some restore app that runs under ubuntu, not windows.

You can try adding the TestDisk package or download SystemRescueCD. Boot , select normal/default startup, when you get to a prompt type startx then you will get the gui and it makes it a little easier to use the tools. TestDisk is commandline based so you will need to look up the instructions wich you can use the web from the live cd anyways.