Computer disaster

£440,000 · January 4, 2013

This morning while the missus and the kid were asleep, I decided to have a play around with Ubuntu on a USB as I've been thinking about installing it as a second OS. I'd just got it booted up when my son came in the room and asked for a drink and some food. I was gonna no more than two minutes, but when I came back, by randomly banging keys looking for the Cat in the Hat, he'd started to install Ubuntu over Windows. It had only just started so I thought I'd gamble on it only being in the process of preparing files and pulled the plug. Naturally, it wouldn't even think about rebooting. I couldn't even get the Ubuntu USB drive to boot.

I used an old laptop to install PartedMagic on a pen and that shows the hard drive as being partitioned for Linux and all the Windows folders have gone. I'm using the PhotoRec program on there to pull off all the files I want, but, unfortunately, they're all coming off minus their original names.

I've got a Windows 7 installation disk ready to reinstall, but before I do that, does anyone have any other ideas? The Ubuntu installation was only running for a minute so it can't have had time to wipe anything, Is there a way of putting the windows partition, boot record or some such back without deleting everything and at the same time getting the file names back?

Thanks.

pipnasty · January 4, 2013

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