guess messed up partitions?

[Dave Stevens]

A dual boot system with windows 7 and U14.04 had a startup grub menu  
to select either windows (7) or the Windows recovery partition or  
Ubuntu. The user mistakenly chose the windows recovery to start and  
aborted the process when he realised what he'd done. The system now  
boots only as far as a grub error: partition not found, then falls  
back to grub rescue.

Booting from usb shows that fdisk -l can see partitions and sizes and  
detects ntfs correctly in every case. I see two options - one is to  
guess the partitions and correct (how?) the table or grub and see if  
that enables data recovery. I vaguely recall seeing a program called  
gpart for Windows and wonder if anyone has seen something similar for  
Ubuntu.

Also I can boot from the usb key then use foremost to do file recovery  
to another usb (hard) drive. I'd rather try guessing the partitions  
and restoring the partition table if possible. Or at least try that  
first.

Ideas? RTFM?

Dave


-- 
"As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business,
the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance."
(hard) drive.
-- John Dewey