Partitions Lost on Upgrade to Version 8

Hi guys, bit of a Linux noob but here's my problem and hope you can help.

I had previously a 500GB drive partitioned into 3 sections:

80GB EXT4 with Zorin 7 on it
4GB Swap Partition
416GB NTFS with Windows Vista and full of personal data

I downloaded and installed Zorin 8 and in the install options I chose the first (replace Zorin 7 with Zorin 8). Now this seems to have deleted all my old partitions and created one big Linux EXT 4 partition and a swap partition. Have I lost everything? I have tried Testdisk which did not seem to help.

Hi Klyonari and welcome to Zorin! Can you boot into your Zorin install? If so can you please launch GParted (just search for it in the win7 menu search bar to bring it up) and post a screenshot of your hard drive by using 'Screenshot' in Accessories? Before posting, please click on the saved Screenshot in Image viewer (it should do this automatically when you double click on the saved file) then save the image with the extension '.jpg' and dependent upon which is the smaller, post that by clicking 'upload attachment' below the post window, then press 'place in-line' after the screen has refreshed, then post. Full guidance on how to upload a screenshot here:

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v385833212XzmANbj

Hi,

if you chose auto install it will not create a seperate home partition!, see this guide about partitioning:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2601

And this one about keeping your data intact:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4848

Once formatted, your data is lost on those partitions you chose to format (auto format).

Hope it helps.

Regards Wolfman

Hi guys thanks for the replies. Struggling to upload a screenshot as I don't want to save anything to the HDD incase I have to try and recover data. The screenshot would show only one drive (496 Volume) with Linux home folders in it (bin, boot, cdrom, dev, etc). As the drive was already partitioned I assumed the installer would only rewrite the partition Zorin 7 was on . Test disk found no other partitions but using Photorec did find many files so hopefully I should be able to recover some of my data this way?

My problem is that if I have to do this I have no spare drive to save recovered files to unless the save drive can be set as a network location, is this possible and where would this be found in the Linux file structure when navigating through terminal?

Hi Kiyonari, for you to access a network drive on a windows machine you would need to install samba4 (I recently installed this on Zorin 8 RC to try and install network printer attached to XP Machine - ironically I can see other network folders but can't get to the printer - but if you allow shares on a Windows PC I would put them in 'Public' if you have another machine with Windows 7 or 8 on. You could try Hiren's Boot CD and boot off a stick or live CD/DVD and search for files on your PC and use network tools - but would advise that you connect using network cable, not wirelessly for transferring data. Keep us posted!

Thanks for the reply. I will try samba and to install to usb or maybe it runs from live cd? Without buying a new hdd (need one eventually to prevent this occuring again!) my only option for saving recovered data is to the hdd on my windows 7 laptop hdd so hopefully this works