Hello. I'd very much like to recover my Windows system, if for no other reason than I want to access my documents. Gparted isn't much help; it just tells me that several clusters have been referenced multiple times and offers to save the details in HTML format. Help!

First; You give no details about the situation. Did you replace Windows with another system? Is WIndows intact, but you cannot access it? Other?
Second; Why do you not have backup copies of your files?

You would likely have more luck trying to recover your windows system by using tools designed for the proprietary windows system. A secondary option would be Testdisk. You will need to post more specific information before getting help.

No, I didn't replace Windows. My files aren't back up because I just don't have a spare hard disk lying around, or the $ to buy one. (Okay, so my operating system files aren't backed up.)

Why can you not access your files on that system? No one can help, until they know exactly what the problem is.
I keep copies of important files on discs (CD and DVD). I am not being rude, just pointing out the obvious. Backup copies of important files are a necessity, not a luxury. Hardware can fail, files can be corrupted, files can be lost (Everyone has accidentally deleted files they wanted to keep.), computers can be stolen, etc.

Since you do not have backups and want to get the ones on your Windows system, provide details of your situation.

@Seff: What others are trying to ask is what did you do before this happened.. ? Did you mangle around with gparted before (or, worse, with fdisk)? .. Did this happened after a linux installation.. Did this happened after a power failure while writing to the disk?.. Did this happened just out of the sudden?

Then, second thing... What exactly is the state of your partitions right now.. ? Do you still have the Windows partition? Do you know what a partition is? We can't really help you with solid advice until we know how to help you.. Most likely, from what you told us so far, it seems that your partition table got really messed up and that can cause harm to all of your systems and data on the disk... It's bad that you don't have another disk since testdisk with photorec is probably your best bet right now and that would go a lot more smooth with another disk to save everything Photorec is recovering..

Yes, I still have the Windows partition. I couldn't tell you how the circuitry works, but I know a partition is a division on the hard drive.

What happened was, I was trying to size everything just right- some space for Windows, some for Linux. I probably resized the Windows partition before things went south; Windows doesn't like being jostled around, right?

What's Testdisk and Photorec? I'm not just trying to save pictures; I want to get my documents back. (Everything in the computer world seems to have double meanings- an image can also be a copy, and a document can easily be a picture.)

Well, the thing is that a partition is a division on the hard disk, but every partition has a file-system... That's why it's not smart and sometimes it's not even possible to resize already used partition (those with files on them -- specially with an operating system like Windows on them)..

Now, moving on, every photo, document, or basically anything on the file-system is known as a file.. we might say documents to files that are holding texts (simple like .txt or .doc) and photos to any image (regardless of the type) but they are still basically a file and the file-system is responsible to actually point to where the file is on the partition (where it begins, what clusters/inodes/etc. it occupies, etc, etc..)... Anyway, the most important thing to know is that sometimes deleting or modifying a partition does not mean you delete or modify the data on that partition... Just like deleting a file will just tell the file-system the physical location on the disk is free for use but the actual data of the file is still (invisible to you) there.

Testdisk is a tool that tries to recover deleted partitions, file-systems or files... It does that if it can actually find a valid a file-system on the hard-disk that does not coincide with the current partition scheme (this would tell it how large of a partition used to exist there)... That would be a lucky case scenario for you since it would just mean you haven't touched the meta-information of the file-system and the tool could really help you recover any files that has not been overriden physically on the hard-disk...

PhotoRec is way more complicated and scans the physical hard-disk (or portion that you tell it to) for any file-type it recognizes (e.g. .doc, .jpg, etc)... It then tries to guess how big the file is and assumes that it is not fragmented (works on small files, like document and pictures -- doesn't work that well on movies) and tries to blindly recover that file.. It also generates a lot of false positive and it would be best to run the tool from a live distribution with a second hdd installed..


Both of these tools are best to be done on images of the actual hard-disk or partition.. And that is why a second (larger) hard-disk would really be recommended here.. Also, both tools require some knowledge...
I'm sorry, but if you can't boot in Windows or you can't mount your Windows partition, there is really no real hope for you to recover what you need and you should start accepting that you lost it.. But, you can try these two tools if you want... Or just shut-down your PC and find a guy who really knows what his doing (but it can get expensive)

I do have my files backed up. I just don't have Windows backed up. And when I tried getting something from the backup, Linux just told me I had an error without specifying what it was.