Alright, n00b mistake here, I think, I'm just trying to see if there's a way to salvage the situation. In my defense, it was late, I was tired, and suffering from a lack of clear reasoning skills.

It goes like this. I'm screwing around a lot with Clojure, Noir, and Overtone these days. I was sick of nothing working on Windows (weird form bugs no one else was getting, crappy dev support, etc) so in a fit of rage I installed Linux.

I went to ubuntu.com and downloed the Windows installer at http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/windows-installer. I went through a few install windows to set up a 16 GB partition and install ubuntu to it. But, when I rebooted my machine, it went straight to Ubuntu - no pre-OS-loading option to start up Windows instead.

Soooo.... I'm afraid that I destroyed my Windows partition. But I don't think I did - maybe my Windows partition is there, but the BIOS/POST/whatever (sorry, not a hardware guy) doesn't know about it?

Any ideas on what I can do to at least salvage the data from my previous partition?

1) Your Windows partition is probably still there. Open GParted and check.
2) If you have a Windows recovery CD, you can get to the Window RE (recovery environment), open a command prompt, and use the bootrec.exe tool to fix the BCD and/or MBR. You might also be able to tell GRUB to recognize Windows as a boot option
3) I'm concerned that Ubuntu didn't do that last bit automatically, in fact. Check GParted.

Haven't heard of GParted - thanks for the mention. I'll check it out.

AFAICT, you're installing Ubuntu through Wubi (the windows installer), so GParted would be useless to you. However, I think bcdedit should help. Your Windows files and such should still be there, but it seems that the Wubi installer set Ubuntu as the default boot option (which it should not do...). You should try using bcdedit from a Windows DVD with the /default switch to fix the default boot option, then boot back into Windows and edit its bootloader from there.

if i remember correctly, there's also a key combination that will tell the windows bootloader to display itself rather than just moving along and booting the default option.

You should be able to go into your home folder and just brows your files on the windows partition, at least that's what I do when I need a file from that partition. This is a way you could make sure that the windows partition is actually there still.

jwalker, wubi doesn't work that way, though. it installs ubuntu to a virtual disk that's a file inside the windows partition, uses another file as swap, and puts an entry in the windows bootloader. the disk's partition table itself should be completely untouched.

I see that now, but still he should be able to see his windows files. Also I think there is a hot key at boot up, but I could be wrong.

just for future reference, if you want ubuntu, its probably a better idea to download the iso and install it on a new partition than to use wubi.

Also for future reference: don't use ubuntu. Use something with less, shall I say, commercialism. (Fedora and Debian are both good choices, though they have a slightly higher learning curve).

Oh, man, here comes the hard-core linux discussion XD

That's for sure.

That's a stupid suggestion. Ubuntu is built to be user-friendly, so if it's not "hard core" enough for you, then you just come off as a Linux snob. It's great for the Linux newbie.

But this isn't the appropriate topic for criticizing someone's distro choices anyway.

Specifically, there are problems with its commercialization, and the image it puts forth for linux newbies. If they see ads and think it's like android where everything free has ads, they may very well switch back to something w/o ads and not try other distros.

Yeah, well it hasnt gotten to that point yet

I honestly couldn't give a dog's crap about which distro of Linux I use.
And I have yet to see any ads on Ubuntu, ever, in a couple years of using it.

Anyways, it appears that I don't have two separate partitions - when I start up GParted, I see this;



So yeah, something weird's going on with Wubi. I don't think I need to fix it - I have access to all my Windows files at /host, and therefore the full capacity of my hard drive.

And about booting, I rebooted and I got the option to start up either Windows or Ubuntu. So we're good.

Glad you have it working. I think Wubi offers you the option of writing to a separate partition, overwriting your Windows partition, or saving everything inside the Windows partition.

I've had trouble with Wubi too—tried to install to a separate partition and it crashed partway through, and now I can't boot either :/

Wubi is an interesting but dangerous hack. It basically uses the Windows bootloader to boot the Linux Kernel, in this case Ubuntu's, off of your existing NTFS partition. While great for playing around it never should have been pushed into a production environment like what Ubuntu pretends to be. You'll never see RHEL doing anything so crazy.

Just because it works doesn't mean its a good idea.