I accidentally installed Ubuntu to one of my data drives from Windows. The drive was a NTFS drive and contained about 80 GB of important data. The size of the drive is 110 GB. Its new file system is ext4.

In an attempt to recover the data, I downloaded foremost and tried the following commands:

foremost -i / -o /media/281C8DB01C8D7998/Recovery/ -T -v
foremost -i /dev/sda7 -o /media/281C8DB01C8D7998/Recovery/ -T -v

(sda7 is the drive in question.)

It appears that with either command, foremost gets stuck reading some file. Here is the console output:

abhi@abi-PC:/dev$ foremost -i /dev/sda7 -o /media/281C8DB01C8D7998/Recovery/ -T -v
Foremost version 1.5.7 by Jesse Kornblum, Kris Kendall, and Nick Mikus
Audit File

Foremost started at Fri Sep 28 20:58:00 2012
Invocation: foremost -i /dev/sda7 -o /media/281C8DB01C8D7998/Recovery/ -T -v 
Output directory: /media/281C8DB01C8D7998/Recovery_Fri_Sep_28_20_58_00_2012
Configuration file: /etc/foremost.conf
Processing: stdin
|------------------------------------------------------------------
File: stdin
Start: Fri Sep 28 20:58:00 2012
Length: Unknown

Num  Name (bs=512)         Size  File Offset     Comment 

Killed

As you can see I have to kill it from system monitor. This approach does not seem to be working. What else could I try to recover the files?

Please help. The files are very important and I will be devastated if I cannot recover them.