Hi,

I convinced my sister into trying linux instead of windows. When she agreed, I messed things up for her in the install and now her files are gone.

I was trying to install Kubuntu. I had backed up all of the data into one partition (hda7 ... which is the last partition) and restructured the other partitions. When applying changes, it crashed in the middle so I had to start again and redo things.

Finally when everything was installed, I tried mounting the NTFS hda7 partition but to no success. Upon checking in fdisk, it was listed as ext3 but even could not mount it with ext3. I checked in windows and the partition is marked as "unknown". what has changed is that instead of hda7 being logical, it is now marked as primary.

I have checked testdisk and I am not able to recover any files from it. Any ideas?

1. Testdisk ... did not find any files from that partition
2. Partition magic ... got some messages that something wrong with the partition table, it fixed that, but get Error 17 and partition magic cannot start
3. chkdsk ... did not find anything

Any other ideas? I read something about DD but I have never tried it and I am worried I might mess up things.

Use the photorec option that comes with test disk and be sure that the storage media is at least twice as large as the disk you are saving.
Try mounting the computer with a live cd such as knoppix v5 and see what comes up.

I tried PhotoRec as you suggested. But I cannot access majority of the recovered files. Some of the files are unrealistic (e.g., a jpg image with 40 MB size). Can I recover the files using DD command in Linux? I am seeing various ways of using DD but nothing so far for my case.