I was installing Ubuntu 12.04 on my laptop. While installing it showed the partition menu, and I selected some options that were told to me by Ubuntu users on Ask Ubuntu. I did the same, but I wasn't sure about that, so I quit the installation process and restarted my laptop. I let Windows start as normal, and then on opening My Computer, I saw that all the drives (hard disk D and E) were gone. I had a lot of important data on them. What do I do now? Is the data gone?
I have a 64-bit OS.
Unfortunately, your data is most likely gone. Most likely your data drive was reformatted as a home for Ubuntu. This means that the actual Ubuntu installation could have been placed on top of other data, rendering at least some of it irrecoverable.
There is some limited good news however. There are a number of different programs that can be used to recover data. The Ubuntu DataRecovery Community Page should be a good start to recovering what can be recovered.
A final bit of warning if you choose to recover the data. Avoid using your newly installed Linux, as writes to that partition will possibly minimize the chance of successful recovery.
