Installed Mint 16 over Mint 15, windows 7 is gone

mystictomato · 04-14-2014, 01:09 PM

Hello there Linux users

I'm in a rather bad situation. I decided to upgrade Linux Mint 15 to 16 today by booting from a live CD and chose to replace the former completely. My laptop works (worked) in dual-boot with Windows 7, which did not appear to be recognized by the Mint 16 installer. After installation, my Windows seems to have been overwritten, and although Mint was residing on /dev/sda6 it now appears to reside on /dev/sda1, and shows about 490GB free out of my HDD's 500GB. Moreover, it boots directly into Mint.

Is it possible that the MBR is corrupt and my Windows (or at least what's left of my data) still remains? Can I recover anything?

sudo fdisk -l outputs:
http://imgur.com/qcY1oa2

gparted displays:
http://imgur.com/YLe0SaE

Thank you for any help you may have to offer.

yancek · 04-14-2014, 04:56 PM

Your GParted image looks like you have more than one drive. If you have only one hard drive, it appears you have overwritten your winsows installation. If you have multiple drives, you may still have windows.

Quote:

Windows 7, which did not appear to be recognized by the Mint 16 installer

That doesn't look good, would have been a good time to stop the install. Which option did you select for the Installation Type? Something Else is usually the best if you have another OS on the system as you can see what is happening and make choices.

Quote:

although Mint was residing on /dev/sda6 it now appears to reside on /dev/sda1, and shows about 490GB free out of my HDD's 500GB

Actually your GParted output shows 1.02MB unallocated/free space and your Mint partition formatted ext4 is 457GB. If you don't have backups of your data, you could have serious problems recovering it. You might be able to recover data using TestDisk. Just do an online search to get the download site.

mystictomato · 04-17-2014, 02:55 PM

Quote:

If you have only one hard drive

Yes, unfortunately.

Quote:

Which option did you select for the Installation Type?

I selected "Replace existing installation" (or something along those lines). I *could* have chosen "Something else", but of course I didn't

) It seems that Windows (and C: ) was overwritten completely and the filesystem on D: was damaged beyond repair.

Quote:

You might be able to recover data using TestDisk.

I did use TestDisk, which worked great. It managed to recover the partition which had the bulk of my files, which was placed somewhere at the end of the hard drive. So thank you for your suggestion!