My intention was to have a dual boot system with Ubuntu and Windows 7. Obviously I did something wrong because although I had a system menu on booting (is it normal to appear DOS-like?) which gave me an option of booting into windows 7, I was unable to do so. Also, when I booted into Ubuntu, my Windows 7 drive was not available. The Windows 7 drive was an internal 1TB drive partitioned into a 200GB (OS) and a second partition making up the remainder.

I was still unable to access this Windows 7 drive even after deleting Ubuntu as I kept getting an 'requires an NTFS drive' error, or something similar. I could not even re-install Windows 7 as the disk was not recognised. I did eventually get the drive back by but I cannot for the life of me remember how. I did try to recover my lost W7 data using Ontrack Easy Recovery (which has always been succesfull in the past for post format recovery) but it would not recognise the 1TB although it was now formatted as NTFS. From other posts on this site, I gather that this is considered a 'Windows 7 Site' problem by Linux users. However, I would dearly love to recover some of my lost Windows 7 files.

I had resigned myself to a lot of lost personal data but I happened to notice that a 2TB drive I had connected through a USB docking station had been repartitioned. It must have happened when I installed Ubuntu as I can think of no other explanation. I certainly do not remember consciously requiring Ubuntu to do this. The additional two partitions on the 2TB drive, the original Windows