A brief history....I have a dell laptop that was working fine until one day I got the BSOD. I tried the usual troubleshoots with no luck. I found Ubuntu and saved it to a disk. I then booted my laptop from that CD.

At first I tried the option that wouldn't change my computer. When I did that, I was able to view the hard drive and all my files. I have no idea what happened next but something compelled me to install Ubuntu. Now that I've done that, I can no longer view the files on my hard drive....no matter how many times I attempt to mount the drive. And I can no longer get to the Dell recovery program by using Ctrl-F11 and I'm pretty sure Windows is gone.

I know NOTHING about Linux but I decided to try it because all else failed and I read so many success stories. I really don't care if I have windows or not....but I would still love to recover my files. Is this possible?? I do apologize if this is covered in another thread. I did some perusing but couldn't really find anything.

BTW, when I do fdisk -l, it confirms there are no partitions in NTFS. I assume this is because windows is gone.

I need some help!

Uh ... yes ... the install would have wiped WinDuhs. Didn't you read all the warnings the installer brought up? The usual thing to do is use another disk or else 'shrink' the NTFS partition using a suitable program and create a separate partition for Linux (and possibly another partition for the "swap" file).

You may be able to recover some things if you boot from another disk and run some recovery tools. I hope you have a backup for your WinDuhs files.