Recover deleted Windows 7 from inside Mint?

Alright, I'm not sure what exactly happened when I was trying to install Linux Mint, but I think I somehow deleted my Windows 7 Partition and basically screwed myself.


I have 2 drives, Caviar Black and Green. Black was my boot drive, Green has some game stuff. Nothing too important.


I'm not sure what drive has what on it, because under GParted, it says /dev/sda for both drives... but I *think* I deleted the Windows 7 Partition and made the Linux on my Black rather than my Green.


Looking at my drives, my Green has my normal stuff on it, and a partition of 50GB (which is what I wanted to put Linux on).


My Black looks like it has 50GB of ext4 (Linux), and 884GB unallocated space.


My question is, can I just get my Black drive back to normal, with just Windows 7 installed with all of my files/folders?


Or can I somehow recover ALL of my data, back it up on my Green, and do a fresh install? I'd rather not do that option, but if I have to then I will.



Linux novice, so much help is appreciated.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

A bit of an update, it seems my Black might now be partitioned to GPT instead of NTFS (It's still unallocated except for the 50GB Linux is on).

I ran testdisk to check under Intel (created in Vista), and came up with this:

 

If you indeed wrote over your Windows partition with Mint, you are pretty much out of luck. The whole 7 pass delete thing is working pretty much off the fact that *in theory* you can still determine what was on your drive before it was overwritten. So really the only way those recovery sofwares work is by reading the raw data off your drive and if you somehow deleted the master boot record, or the part that indicated where each partition starts/stops, it could determine with the superblocks what it is and recover it. But it sounds like you stuff is gone.

Run this and post the results

Code:

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdX

replace X wth a, b, c, or whatever disks you know exist. You can figure out what you computer recognizes is is your machine by doing

Code:

$ ls -l /dev/sd*

If fdisk tells you the machine is now is GPT rather than MBR, do

Code:

$sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdX

BTW, NTFS and GPT are not related at all. NTFS is the type of filesystem Windows uses, like how Linux uses ext4 (amongst others) and Macs use HFS+. GPT is the way in which the drive is organized into partitions. So it effectively replaces the MBR. Typically MBR uses the Bios booting system, while GPT uses UEFI, though this is not obligatory.

Good luck dude!


PS Also, instead of pasting a picture, copy and paste and use code blocks. Start w/ [ code ] without the spaces in the brakets and then with [ /code ] again without the spaces. I cannot correctly exemplify without it actually making a code block.