In an attack of sheer idiocy, I decided to install windows to my computer...

I have a sataII drive which holds(held?) my ubuntu install. I installed an ide drive to hold my new windows XP.

So I boot up the windows XP install cd, but when I get to the harddrive recognition part, the win install recognises the sata drive as drive C in one big unknown partition and the ide drive as drive d.

I repartition the d drive and ask the win install to install windows there, but this I am denied.

Then I unplug the sata drive and install windows on to the ide drive, which is now recognized as drive C.

At the end of my install, I reinstall the sata drive and reboot my computer, in hope of seeing my beloved Ubuntu start screen.

I get a screen looking like this:
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_ <- blinking cursor










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Then I think its the good old grub-reinstall problem, so I boot up my ubuntu livecd, but this informs med, that /dev/sda1 is one partition.
mount refuses to mount this partition.
Grub refuses to recognice /dev/sata og (hd0,0). Also find /boot/grub/stage1 in the grub prompt returns nothing.

I unplug the IDE drive and reboot - still nothing...

I install ext2 support for windows and try to find the drive in file explorer - but this only returns, that the drive (now recognized as E is not formatted.

HELP ME!!!

I think my first encounter with the win install cd is where things messed up, but how do I get back my precious ubuntu drive(whith all my data - months work - no backup :-( )

Hopefully only the MBR (boot-loader plus partition table) are gone.
Try testdisk - might be on the Ubuntu liveCD, is certainly on Knoppix.
Windoze would have (attempted) to install to the primary drive - at least requires the "system" partition there. Things like boot.ini, ntldr. Has been known to walk all over other (useful) partitions.

Use your "live Cd" to open gparted (or other partition editor) and see what Windows did. Hopefully you at least kept your /home partition if you made one. If not I highly advise doing so in the future. If your system gets whacked you can still recover files from /home. Also it is a good idea to backup everything a few times a year or more if you run a business. I personally just burn everything to dvd just in case my computer walks off or blows up or implodes or . . . .

Knoppix (or at least my danish derivative dappix) refused to recognize my sata drive, but I discovered the program gpart.

I ran my ubuntu livecd and downloaded gpart.
Then I ran gpart -w /dev/sda /dev/sda
Then the grub reinstall

My beloved ubuntu is back!

Thanks for the help

Bendt Rasmussen