I had Vista and fedora 9 installed on my vaio CR-36 laptop. Then I restored C drive by Vaio recovery option( which only restored C drive) and removed grub by using super Grub. But I think the linux partition is intact. So please tell how to recover this previous linux installation without going through installation again. I had some important data on that partition. Also since i removed grub by using super grub, no grub prompt is shown at startup and vista boots directly.

Just insert the Fedora installation disc and try to repair the bootloader(in this case GRUB). I dont remember what was the option in discs boot menu, but im sure it has a recovery option which you can reinstall the GRUB with it.

For data recovery it is best not to fiddle with the target drive. What you can try to do it plug the drive to another system and attempt data recovery with utilities like testdisk or photorec (works with media files). When using another drive's installation ensure that it does not automatically write to the target drive, like when creating a swap file. This also applies in the case when using live CDs which sometimes automatically use the hard disk's linux partitions for swap. Disable this behaviour.
You can also check out testdisk/photorec from within windows.

Until this hypothesis is proved incorrect, there is no reason to be messing w/ testdisk or photorec.


Do you have a live CD --

• the fedora inst. disk?
• the Super Grub Disk?
• Knoppix?
• SimplyMEPIS?

Running fdisk -l from any live CD should tell if you fedora partition is still there. If it is, as you suspect & hope, then proceed w/ the repair.

Re-installing Grub boot-loader :
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Reinstalling_GRUB