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I had 3 NTFS partitions (C,D,E) on my old laptop running Vista. I wanted to install Ubuntu on the system partition C, i.e. over-write Vista, but keep D,E which were storage partitions.

Stupid moron as I was, in a hurry, instead of going into custom mode, trying to format desired partition to ext4, and then install, I just went with the option "Replace Vista" in Ubuntu wizard, which essentially formatted the whole HDD making it single ext4 volume, and installed Ubuntu to that new partition.

What are my chances of restoring something / anything of the data on the lost storage partition E, now that disk was already written to? (I guess chances are minimal...) I tried running TestDiks on live GParted USB, but I'm not sure how to use it for this scenario...

Any tip would be greatly appreciated...

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    Just follow the steps outlined in their Step By Step guide
    – Vinayak
    Commented Jun 8, 2014 at 15:41
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    I think your chances are good, but you might have to resort to TestDisk's "Deeper Search" feature which takes a really long time to find the lost partitions. However, before you change anything, make sure you create a backup of the partition table.
    – Vinayak
    Commented Jun 8, 2014 at 15:45
  • Thanks for the encouragement... :) Can you give me some more context on what is the purpose of currently backing up the partition table, and how could I do that ?
    – Less
    Commented Jun 8, 2014 at 15:51
  • @Vinayak can youplease advise - should I try backing up partition table (i.e. MBR) from some live drive, or from the newly installed Ubuntu...?
    – Less
    Commented Jun 8, 2014 at 16:04
  • @Vinayak I think I managed to recover NTFS partition table (with some additional problems along the way), and major part, if not all of the data. If you made an answer out of your comments, I'd gladly accept it!
    – Less
    Commented Jun 8, 2014 at 19:14

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I'd recommend that you use TestDisk to recover the lost partitions.

However, TestDisk is a really powerful software but can be a little intimidating for beginners, so you should probably take a look at their Step By Step guide and follow the instructions mentioned there to recover your HDD partitions.

Before you proceed though, I'll highly recommend that you backup your current partition table just in case something bad happens and you need to restore your partitions to the way they are now.

You can create a partition table backup from TestDisk itself. Watch this instructional video to learn how to do that.

TestDisk's quick search might not turn up all of your lost partitions. That's when you need to switch to Deeper Search mode but beware, this mode can take a lot of time to search your HDD (depending on the HDD size)

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