Windows 8 lost after boot repair and re-installation of Ubuntu
I have a Dell Inspiron laptop with Windows 8 pre-installed; I upgraded it to Windows 8.1 preview.
A few days later, I successfully installed Ubuntu 13.04 (via USB) on a separate partition created by Windows. However, Ubuntu would not load; instead Windows loaded.
After a bit of researching, I ran boot repair, and then both my operating systems were gone and I had no option to boot any OS.
I installed Ubuntu via USB again and it is working fine now. Now I am concerned about how to recover the Windows operating system. Have I lost my other files as well?
A summary of my system.
- Dell Inspiron 7520 (64 bit)
- Windows 8.1 Preview
- 8 GB Ram, 1 TB HDD
- UEFI something, Secure Boot is Off as of now.
Solution 1:
The Boot Repair output to which you've linked indicates that you've completely deleted your Windows installation; the disk has nothing but Linux partitions and the EFI System Partition (ESP; where boot loaders reside). You'll have to shrink /dev/sda2 and re-install Windows 8.1 to get it back.
If you had any important user files on the computer, stop using it now! You may be able to recover some of them using a tool like PhotoRec, but the more you use the computer in the meantime, the more likely it is that you'll destroy whatever data might be left over from your previous Windows installation. Note also that there are Windows tools that may do a better job than PhotoRec at recovering Windows files; but I don't know offhand what those tools are, so I can't provide any references or recommendations.