Partition recovery program that runs in linux?

Okay so I have been trying out different linux distros to see what i like and what i dont.

Yesterday I installed Fedora. Everything seemed to go well until i booted up my computer - Vista did not show up in grub, only Fedora and Vista Loader(the one that boots the D recovery partition thing). Anyway, messing around with it trying to get it to show vista, i somehow corrupted my D partition. I finally ended up having to use super grub to boot directly into Vista (since grub would not show it). In Vista, it was asking me to format my D partition in order to use it. Like that was gunna happen. So then I deleted my D partition and used a partition recovery tool to get it back. That solved my problem yesterday. You would think I learned my lesson.

Today I decided to try Sabayon. Well after installing Sabayon, the same thing that happend with Fedora happened...grub would not show an option to boot up vista! Which dumbfounded me, because when i installed crunchbang, vista showed up fine. Anyway, i messed around with it again, trying to show up vista, but to no avail. So i loaded up super grub, and tried to boot into vista. This time tho, even super grub would not boot into vista. So i loaded up sabayon and ran gparted. It seems that this time i corrupted my C partition...its not being recognized as NTFS correctly it seems. Anyway since I cant load into windows, I cant really delete-partition the drive my windows is on anyway, I need to know if there is a similar partition recovery program that runs in linux? One that I can recover a deleted NTFS partition with? I attempted to put in my UltimateBootCD, but when i reboot, it doesnt load up, the screen goes straight to grub (odd seeing as my bios is set to load from CD first). Right now im burning a new copy of UBCD since maybe my other cd is corrupted. I also tried googling a program that will recover my NTFS partition that runs in linux but its not really helping me atm. It keeps coming up with ext2/3 recoveries.

If there isnt, I was thinking of two other options, besides just reinstalling windows.

1) To install a fresh copy of vista over my Sabayon partition (its disposable right now anyway). Then deleteing my C partition and recovering it via the same program

or

2)Using virtualbox(i dont know how yet but im sure a google search will help me out) to emulate windows and running the partitioning program from there.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't supergrub out of date? You can always try GAG which has worked fine for me.

Btw, if you use "uninstall," it will clear the mbr no matter what bootloader is installed. With grub uninstalled, your computer might just boot into windows. Also, I always use systemrescuecd when partitioning.

http://gag.sourceforge.net/
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

 

Try using TestDisk. It is an annoying program to wrap your mind around as there is no pretty UI, but if you read through the documentation and play around a bit you'll get it:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

If you already wrote any data over the partitions location on the drive it may not be able to rebuild the partition table. (It may still be worth a shot even if you did.)

That's when PhotoRec could be handy (available on the above link). It will recover any retrievable files. However it will assign you new filenames & still require you to reinstall Windows, but you'll have you important files.

Good luck with TeskDisk if you chose to try it.

 

thx guys. ill give those a try tomorrow. right now, iv had enough partitioning for one day. gunna enjoy sabayon...until i get bored of it XD

 

man, i'm diggin' sabayon

 

+rep for your greg...saved my butt.
only one thing tho...testdisk really needs a "go back" option at every screen!

 

Just for future info.,
A VM(like VirtualBox) doesn't have access to your HDD, only to a virtual one.

 

Haha yes it does. It's a powerful program, but aggravating when you misclick or such because it wants to perform that initial scan every time! Maybe it will be able to index the initial scan in the next version or something .

 

I suggest if you are going to dual boot with any Windows OS, to use a separate grub partition. It's better if you can start from scratch. Or if you only have Windows on your computer, create a small partition, as small as you're allowed, probably 8MB. Then get a Linux distro LiveCD and copy your /boot/grub directory over to it. You chain load Windows which will already have a chain loader entry. Then use GParted, for e.g., to create a 3rd partition for the Linux distro you want to install. Install the distro to that partition and install the grub boot loader for it to the root partition (1st sector of it). All you have to do after that is edit the menu.lst file in the grub partition to chain load your Linux OS. You only have to know or be familiar with a few commands if you get stuck but it's easy to solve most boot problems this way.