I have just loaded Mageia 5 and unfortunately it has removed the
windows partition.

Is there any way of recovering my windows files?

Any help will be appreciated.

I am a Newbie.

Yes, you can look for the tool named testdisk, if those files are still on the disk (you did not overwrite them)

You can recover the partitons with http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

The hard drive was not partitioned - someone kindly installed Mageia not knowing I had windows with ten years worth of files on it. So I need to retrieve those files. Surely they must be a solution to this...
Tried the wiki/TestDisk but that did not want to word - No permission to create..

Pretty much every hard drive is partitioned, and if Linux was installed, the layout certainly changed.

The good news is you can use something like photorec from the testdisk suite.

First, stop using the drive. Anything else you do from here on will be from a USB drive or other drive than that which was overwritten, or you risk making the situation worse.

If you can make a bitwise copy of the drive to an image file or another drive do so. Keep the original safe work off of the backup.

Boot up Linux on Windows on another drive, and install testdisk from the URL above if not already installed. Included in the package is a program, photorec.

If, if, if you're lucky, you can scan partitions with testdisk. Search for the appropriate file system, FAT or NTFS. If the partition(s) look right, allow testdisk to write the partition table. Under Linux, testdisk must be run as root to make changes.

If, if, if you're lucky, one of the backup MFTs (NTFS) will be intact. For FAT, I can't remember if there's a full backup. There's a backup MFT near the end of the drive and it quite possibly survived, depending on how much data was written to the drive. If it did, you're lucky. Try mounting the partition, see what's there.

Unless you got real lucky, you've still incurred some data loss however, and the actual files themselves may have been partially or fully overwritten. At simplest, it depends on how much data was written in the install and how big the drive is.

If the above didn't work, read on...

Now, if doing this in Linux you must run photorec as root.

I would elect to scan the entire disk as you don't know what partitioning changed.

Be warned, it's going to check file headers, and based on them more than likely restore sequential clusters. Some of your files are borked, and going to contain bits of information you don't want mixed in. Sorry, this is just how filesystems work.

More than likely your file names will be lost. You're going to have to sort through every file and rename.

Windows files recovey ,you can get data back from "recycle bin".If not ,you need recovery app to help.