Help, I can't find windows 7
 

Hey guys, new to Linux and what I had was a dual boot windows 7 and windows 8 preview on a seperate partition. I "thought" I installed Ubuntu on the windows 8 version since I am not using that partition and now I cannot find out how to see my partitions and if I still have 7. I am not worried about losing any data on the 7 partition but it will be a big pain if I have to reinstall 7.

The reason I put Ubuntu on was because I had a SD card from a DSLR that was corrupt, luckily I was able to get most of my pics off the SD card but was not able to recover any movies at this point. It was a slow process but at least I did get most of my pics.

If you can get to the cmd line as root (aka admin) in Ubuntu (eg via sudo) try
lowercase L there

Welcome to LQ.

To expand a bit on what Chrism01 said, boot into Ubuntu. Open a terminal (a command line window if you prefer) and run the command: sudo fdisk -l (that's -ell and not -one). It will list the partitions on the hard drive: /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, and so on, along with the filesystem type of each partition.

I am guessing that win7 was on the first partition, and win8 on the second before you installed Ubuntu. After installation, if it was done correctly, you should now have win7 on /dev/sda1 and Ubuntu on /dev/sda2.

If fdisk -l shows sda1 as ntfs and sda2 as ext(2, 3, or 4), win 7 is still there. The installation of Ubuntu may not have added windows to the boot menu. To fix that, run the following command:
sudo /usr/sbin/update-grub2
to force Ubuntu to look for other bootable systems and add them to the grub menu.
When update-grub2 is done, reboot and hopefully you will see win7 in the grub menu.

This is what I have in the terminal

Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000195dc

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 1456832511 728415232 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1456834558 1465147391 4156417 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1456834560 1465147391 4156416 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 15.9 GB, 15931539456 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1936 cylinders, total 31116288 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 8192 31116287 15554048 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
scott@scott-Inspiron-560:~$ ^C
scott@scott-Inspiron-560:~$


The 16 GB drive is the SD card I was recovering corrupted pics from my DSLR. In the 750 GB drive, which is my hard drive I had 2 partitions. One for windows 7 and the other was windows 8 preview. Since I wasn't using 8 preview anymore I wanted to put linux on it. Do I still have windows 7 or did I put linux over windows 7?

It appears your installation may be utilizing the whole drive. There are GUI programs that will show your partitions like gparted & disk-utility, there are more but 1 of these 2 programs may already be installed on your system. The items marked in red show start & end of your linux installation.
There is a small portion of drive which hasn't been written to after 1465147391

You have put Linux over Windows. There are no traces in the fdisk output for sda of any file system as used by Windows (ntfs / fat).

Thanks, good news is I didn't lose any data on 7. So now I will have to reinstall windows 7 this weekend. Is there a link for how to make a dual boot system? Also I was using Ubuntu, should I be using Mint instead?

I was able to get most of my pics off of the SD card so I am happy Linux was able to do that for me which windows 7 was not due to some corrupt files on the SD card. It was slow but at least got 188 of the pics out of 195. For some reason I was unable to get any of the 6 movie files.

Thanks again

Ubuntu and LinuxMint are very similar under their skin, so it really make no much different on which one you want to install, it is really up to you. But if you will install 7 again, just let it take the whole drive. Then make up a partition for ubuntu using the partition tool Gparted or the one in windows.

Then during installation of Ununtu or Mint you will need to direct the installer to that partition.
You can look in youtube for videos on how to do that.

Good luck to you