I had Windows Vista on my lenovo laptop. Some time back I installed Ubuntu Studio on my laptop after removing Vista and had some free space. In this free space I installed Windows XP. I was happy with Ubuntu so I decided to remove XP. I used fdisk to delete the windows partition. However, this deleted all existing partitions except those used by ubuntu.

I had my lenovo recovery primary boot partition /dev/sda1 which could install Vista again. This also got deleted. I badly want this partition back. In it's place fdisk shows free space exactly equal to the memory of deleted partition...

Help is appreciated...

A first step...

It is advisable to use Clonezilla or the command dd to make a cloned copy of the HDD, or that Vista partition, on another HDD as a prelude to any attempt to recover the lost partitions. Working on the copy allows you more than one attempt on the problem without loosing the contents of the original. Obviously, you should not now be writing anything to the disk, or that portion of the disk that you wish to recover, assuming it appears to the system as formated.

Several live-cds have recovery tools. Testdisk has been recommended on this forum and there have been several good posts. Use the forums search function and google for howtos.

I merely refer all of this information, as I have never had the pleasure of solving such a problem on my own behalf. I usually endeavour to avoid such difficulties by using a live-cd of Parted Magic to partition and check partitions, as it has both GParted with its GUI and fdisk and cfdisk if I need them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk

Good luck, and your post reads as if your chances are good.

If you are unable to recover the hidden partition using the tools suggested above..

You would probably have to use the recovery CD's DVD's you created when you first purchased the laptop to recreate the hidden service and recovery partition. That process will most likely wipe everything else on the laptop, since recovery disks are not known to play well with anything else. Their sole function is to get the laptop back to the condition it was in when you received it from the factory.

If you did not create recovery disks you may be able to order them from Lenovo for a fee.

Hi,

First, 'fdisk' didn't delete the partitions. You did.

You should do a backup of the hdd before you do anything else.

You should be able to recover the partition by utilizing the blocks within fdisk as long as you have the start and stop. Or you can use 'test-disk' or 'Ranish' to recover. 'UBCD' or 'SystemRescueCd' would be useful LiveCDs to have on hand.

These links and others can be found at 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

If the partition was deleted and and it has not been overwritten yet, then you can simply restore it. Launch fdisk, select create partition and set the boundaries exactly as they were before. If unsure, run testdisk first to find out what they were - but be careful, there is a one-off issue between fdisk and testdisk (fdisk counts from 1, testdisk from 0).