Can not access Windows
 

installed ubuntu on hard drive by mistake, can i access my microsoft files or recover them?

Hi, welcome to LQ!


Sorry to hear you had a slip-up.

Hard to say w/ the information at hand. What does your partition table look like?

In a console:

Cheers,
Tink

Recovery
 

You can recover anything on a hard drive. You can use google to find some very good tools to do this but be warned the free ones will not work. It is mostly the commercial products that work well. Example would be Encase.
I have done some forensic work and though a machine had been reformatted with a new xp install I was able to recover 100% of the data from previous installation dating back over 4 years.

If you've overwritten your Windows install with Ubuntu, you should be able to recover a lot by using Photorec to recover files to an external or second drive of some sort.

I am planning to use photorec to access my overwritten data and here is my hard drive any comments are welcome:
Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0008b933

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 29637 238053376 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 29637 30402 6142977 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 29637 30402 6142976 82 Linux swap / Solaris
orno@orno-desktop:~$

I would just boot up a live distro of your choice, mount an external hard drive, and use photorec or something else to recover to the external. I've had to do it before MANY times.....