using ubuntu to recover windows files

i have windows xp on my little laptop here and i decided to test run 10.04 ubuntu. Everything was great and i was exploring ubuntus menus and everything. i decided i wanted to install it and have winxp and ubuntu dual booting. so i started installing it and got to the partition section. I wasnt real familiar with that setup so i closed it down and was going to try and setup the partitions in windows because i was used to that. i dont know what happened, but when i tried to get into the recovery console on windows, it just started formatting my pc....it was the ghost console or whatever its called. And it started formatting about 2-3% and nothing would stop it so i manually shut down the pc. now when i boot it up i can go to the bios or wait a few seconds and it will just have a black screen with flashing cursor in the top left. So i went into the bios and made my ubuntu boot first and it works fine still, now i am typing on it. I used some commands in terminal to basically see what my partitions still have left. I only really want the photos and some other files on the partitions. i can see the 'documents and settings' folder in the terminal but im not sure how to go about getting files from it. Gparted shows like 28gb of used space so there are files still there. Going into the filesystem also shows the documents and settings folder but says it is empty.

any help would be nice, just let me know if you need to know anything else about what i tried already.

peace.

 

I suggest you boot from your ubuntu 10.04 disc and run ubuntu from it as opposed to booting from your installation of ubuntu on the hard drive. I believe you'll be able to browse around through all contents of the hard drive that way. Once you locate the photos, you could copy them to a partition that will be recognized by ubuntu (booted from hard drive) or, better yet, burn them to a CD/DVD, or copy to a flash drive and then connect it to another computer to burn the discs.

About 6 or 7 months ago, I used this technique to save some photos on a laptop (owned by someone else) that would not start from Windows. By booting and running Ubuntu from a CD, I was able to browse folders on the hard drive, locate photos, copy them to a flash drive (as I recall, had to get several batches since flash drive would not hold all at once), and then burned them to disc on another computer.

 

Well nothing on ubuntu worked so I plugged the hdd into my desktop because it had an extra SATA slot. Then I tried about ten different recovery programs and none of them found any pictures. Finally I found one called Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery. It found about 13000 images. I had to buy the software to actually restore the photos but since it wasn't my laptop or my pictures I didnt really have a choice. I copied them all to an external hdd and now I am going through the pictures getting rid of all the system image files and other pictures she doesn't want. Ugh.