dual boot (windows xp home, kubuntu breezy) partition1=windows, partition2=kubuntu, partition 5ish=fat32 data partition.

3 days ago my laptop went into suspend in windows. the next time i turned it on i used kubuntu. today i booted into windows. all the windows i was working in were displayed and i realized my files werent there. i assume that when windows suspended it wrote its state to the hard disk, and then returnd my data partion to that state when it was booted today.

is there anythign i can do to get the files i made in kubuntu back? and to stop this from happening.. maybe disable suspend in windows...

well check
diskmgmt.msc from windows(use start->run>diskmgmt.msc)
check if the partition is still there
if the partition is still there your bootloader has been either removed (or some other problem)
reinstall bootloader

sorry i think you missunderstood me. just the files i had created in linux were gone, my bootloader and partition table is intact

Are the files there if you reboot into Ubuntu? I don't personally have a laptop, so I don't mess with suspend modes and such, but my impression was that suspend mode copied your working memory to harddisk for later restore. It doesn't snapshot every single file out there on disk and restore all those files later. That would be quite a task, and it would eat up a lot of disk space! I realize my comments don't help you. I'm just hoping that your files aren't really gone, and this is just some Windows hose-up. I'm intrigued to hear what the final resolution is.

Suspend does not write any files, Hibernation does and yes it can be turned off in the power management settings in windows.

and by the way if there is a physical write you can get back your data. If it is only in cache , and was not written in harddisk ,you can't . Either you can use tools like dd(extremely time consuming and requires technical knowledge ) or you can try some other file recovering utlities(check sourceforge and freshmeat). There are commercial programs available too.

youre right enine, it must have been hibernation not suspend mode. i've turned it off, thanks everyone for your help. i hope this doesn happent to anyone else. i lost all my data for a midterm