Hello;
I tried to install Kubuntu 12 04, i have choosen the automatic installation; the latter is supposed to
install Kubuntu on the free part of the partition
At the end of the installation i had a message saying that the installation has crashed; and much worse
my windows partition was disabled, the installation was too fast; so i am sure that it was not formatted
but only disabled; can you help me to get back my data on windows partition.
Do you have a windows repair disk? Did you make backup before you started screwing up your computer?
I see, from a post on another forum, that you used Wubi to carry out the installation. Personally, I never really trusted Wubi (and never recommend it), in part due to the fact that Windows is still underlying the virtual disk (which is kind of unreliable, as all Windows things are), and due to the large amount of warnings and cautionary disclaimers on their own official wiki.
Here are a few of the warnings that seem like they could be relevant to your particular case:
Warning
Wubi uses a virtual disk that is sensitive to forced shutdowns. If Ubuntu appears to be frozen please refer to: How to reboot cleanly even when the keyboard/mouse are frozen
Wubi does not work on any new PC with the Windows 8 logo or using UEFI firmware. Please use a 64-bit flavour of Ubuntu, installed directly to its own partition instead. For more information see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI
If you upgraded to Windows 8 and are using BIOS firmware, Wubi does work, but do not enable hybrid-sleep on Windows 8.
This seems like a very plausible problem that you have encountered.
Which Operating Systems are supported?
Windows 7, Vista, XP, and 2000 are known to work with Wubi.
That means, no Windows 8.
Installation error while formatting the swap file
If the installation fails while formatting the swap virtual disk it means that your drive is excessively fragmented. Uninstall, run jkdefrag on the target drive and then run Wubi again.
Did you de-frag before doing this?
Corrupted NTFS filesystem
All reported cases of damaged filesystems were from users who hard rebooted (pulling the plug).
When you hard reboot, there is always a chance of damaging your filesystem, whether you use Wubi or not.
New users, unfamiliar with a new operating system, tend to hard reboot more often than necessary when they encounter problems.
If Wubi becomes damaged as a result of a hard reboot, there is a chance that Windows may also become corrupted since the principle behind Wubi is that of a virtual disk within the host operating system.
Sometimes people blame Wubi for these issues even though a quick Google search will reveal numerous cases of NTFS corruption without users having ever installed Wubi or ntfs-3g (and a full software industry lurking on that…).
If the NTFS filesystem becomes corrupted you need to run chkdsk /r from the Windows Recovery Console on the Windows CD (or other recovery CD available on the web) or in the msdos console (if you can boot into Windows).
At the moment there is no fsck for NTFS on the Linux side, otherwise it would be possible to fix these errors automatically within Linux itself, without having to rely on Windows tools.
The best advice is to simply avoid hard rebooting, whatever OS you may be using.
In other words, you need to get a Windows repair / recovery disk of some kind and do a full file-system check and repair.
And, in the future: make backups first; and, don't use Wubi. If you want a Linux distro running under Windows, then use a VirtualBox. If you want a native dual-boot installation, then install through a LiveCD / LiveUSB on HDD space that you free up by shrinking some partitions under Windows first.
Hello Ancien Dragon
Infortunately i made a big mistake by not backing up my system before installing Kubuntu.
Mike-2000,
Thank you for your kind answer, will try it and get back to you.
Mike-2000
Am using Windows 7
Your Windows partition should still be ok, but the boot loader is fubar. You need to boot into the recovery image and then restore the Windows boot image: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/32523/how-to-manually-repair-windows-7-boot-loader-problems/
The relevant commands are:
Good luck!
Hello rubberman, i tried your solution but it didn't work as if kubuntu disabled the windows partition, the problem is that i didn't backup the system
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