Installer Clobbered my Primary Partition

[Mrcpuhead]

I have a Toshiba laptop w/ 1TB drive. It had Windows 10 and in order to make room for dual boot with Kubuntu, I shrunk the volume to free up 64GB unpartitioned space.

I booted from USB and chose the Install option for 19.04. I selected Guided with LVM, but when I saw what that option would do on the next screen, I chose Back. However, it appears the installer changed the whole disk to the point no OS is found on the hard drive. So far Windows recovery attempts via advanced options have failed, and DISKPART shows the whole drive as unknown.

Is there a way to restore the drive to pre-Kubuntu installer state? Note the fortunate thing is I had no personal data on the Windows side...I inherited this machine so was resetting it for my use, and prefer dual boot if possible.

When I boot into Kubuntu via USB using the "Try" option, I see in partition manager the partition as /dev/sda2, Type = lvm2 vp.

There is a /dev/sda1, NTFS, Recovery, 512 MiB, but it shows 0 B used...so I suspect Windows recovery wasn't completely set up on the machine before I got it.

[jglen490]

It would seem that the first thing to decide is whether you really want a dual boot Windows/Kubuntu system. If so, then reinstalling Windows is a must, with leaving unpartitioned space for Kubuntu. And from there, the simple solution of installing Kubuntu using the Something Else option would be a better choice. It would also be advisable to leave LVM out.

Beyond that, since I haven't done a dual boot installation in way over 15 years, the rest of it I'll leave that to other more experienced hands.

[Mrcpuhead]

I dug deeper into this and rediscovered an old friend. The Testdisk program (https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) is amazing, and helped me confirm that the Windows 10 file structure was still there. I had to identify among 5 choices of the file tree which one was the one to recover - made easier since I had shrunken the partition by ~64GB. Testdisk allowed me to mark this as a primary partition, after which I could access the data. The Kubuntu install (second time around) using manual disk config completed and created a UEFI boot partition. Now I just need to update that UEFI config to include Windows 10 as a boot option. I believe a utility like rEFInd (http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/) can help - if anyone has options for doing this UEFI Windows 10 reconstruction without having to reinstall Windows, I'd appreciate it.

[Don B. Cilly]

I use rEFInd and I really like it.
It did fix all my boot problems, but they had nothing to do with Windows, so...

Anyway I hate grub, so I'm slightly biased there...

[Qqmike]

Would Boot-Repair help?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair