(Urgent) How do I uninstall qubes or install anything else over it

[Mikhail Nairne]

I installed qubes os on my ssd hard-drive with windows 7 and now I'm trying to get back windows but for some reason I can't. can some one please help me out with this because I know my material is still on my drive but how do I get back the windows because I had alot of Important files on my original windows desktop... I hope I'm making sense. I even tried to install Windows again and it wouldn't let me for some reason. so right now im stuck with qubes OS and i cant get to any of the files i had before i installed qubes os. I bought a sata and took out my hard-drive and tried to remove the files that i needed of but the hard-drive didn't show up on the other computer I was using which has never happened before. It wouldn't come up for some reason I think it's becauae of the qubes. please some what help

[Chris Laprise]

On 10/09/2017 07:29 PM, Mikhail Nairne wrote:
> I installed qubes os on my ssd hard-drive with windows 7 and now I'm trying to get back windows but for some reason I can't. can some one please help me out with this because I know my material is still on my drive but how do I get back the windows because I had alot of Important files on my original windows desktop... I hope I'm making sense. I even tried to install Windows again and it wouldn't let me for some reason. so right now im stuck with qubes OS and i cant get to any of the files i had before i installed qubes os. I bought a sata and took out my hard-drive and tried to remove the files that i needed of but the hard-drive didn't show up on the other computer I was using which has never happened before. It wouldn't come up for some reason I think it's becauae of the qubes. please some what help
>

Are you sure you didn't inadvertently erase your Windows partitions when
installing Qubes? When you moved the drive to a different computer, this
was a Windows computer? If so you should be able to find any existing
Windows partitions using Disk Manager:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770943(v=ws.11).aspx

--

Chris Laprise, tas...@posteo.net
https://twitter.com/ttaskett
PGP: BEE2 20C5 356E 764A 73EB 4AB3 1DC4 D106 F07F 1886

[derp...@gmail.com]

Qubes OS 3.2 has a tendency of overwriting all drives on all attached storage mediums during installation. You should ha e removed it physically before hand.

Just a thought but perhaps you changed a setting in bios dissallowing boot from certain disk partitions/boot types. This would happen if you'd set native legacy mode instead of enabling UEFI with CSM.

[[799]]

Hello

---- From: micmaco...@gmail.com ----

>> I installed qubes os on my ssd hard-drive with windows 7 and

>> now I"m trying to get back windows but for some reason I can"t

in case you've joined the Qubes Community for the first time, welcome :-)

I really hope that you've made a backup before (!) installing any other OS on the same harddrive/ssd.

And even if you're not working with a dual boot setup:

BACKUP YOUR DATA - even more important when using windows.

Today you can get a 2,5 portable hdd/ssd for less than 100eur and backup solutions like Veeam are a setup & forgett solution.

Please (if you haven't done so): get a backup solution!

https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html

Regarding your current setup:

From the information you've provided I assume that:

- you had a working windows 7 installation on your ssd

- you have installed qubes os on the same ssd

- you can succesfully boot Qubes and login

If this is correct, keep calm and take closer look what happened.

1) login into Qubes and start a terminal in dom0

2) find the identifier of your internal ssd:

[username@dom0 ~]$ sudo pvdisplay | grep PV

  PV Name               /dev/sda5

  PV Size               327.94 GiB / not usable 4.00 MiB

  PV UUID               A5YJiZ-mYa8-jG9K-6bYd-wYcR-vu3Q-9SBpNp

this will print out three line, one of them: PV Name /dev/sda5

(this could also be something else but the part behin /dev/ is important)

additionally you'll see a line: PV Size 327 GiB

(size will be different in your case).

If the size is much smaller than your ssd capacity it might be, that the other space is still occupied with your windows installation.

3) Show how your ssd is currently partitioned:

In my case I got /dev/sda5 which means that my Qubes setup is running on partition 5 and my ssd is identified by /dev/sda (remove the last number).

[username@dom0 ~]$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 447.1 GiB, 480103981056 bytes, 937703088 sectors

Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disklabel type: dos

Disk identifier: 0x435892a5

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type

/dev/sda1  *         2048   1026047   1024000   500M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sda2         1026048 245762047 244736000 116.7G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sda3       245762048 249956351   4194304     2G 83 Linux

/dev/sda4       249956352 937701375 687745024   328G  5 Extended

/dev/sda5       249958400 937701375 687742976   328G 8e Linux LVM

If you can see something like NTFS this indicates a windows partition.

Make sure that the partition has a reasonable size.

As you can see I have two NTFS (windows formatted) partitions, where the 1st one is only 500mb in size, which indicates the boot partition.

the 2nd one is the one we are looking for.

Do this now and enter the output.

You can copy the data from the terminal in dom0 if you right click on the Q-icon in the upper right corner and choose "Copy dom0 Clipboard".

Then switch to your internet-AppVM and copy the content using Shift+Ctrl+V and after that Ctrl+V

Depending on the output we can provide the next steps.

[799]

[Unman]

This is good advice.
Depending on how important the data is, and the state of your current
backups, you should considetr taking a full disk backup before you do
anything else.

You can do this by booting using a live Linux distribution, (kali,
knoppix etc), and then cloning the disk using dd.
If your ssd disk is /dev/sda, then you can create a disk_image like this:
dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.img
It will take a long time as it will copy the WHOLE disk.

The advantage of this is that you preserve the state of the disk AND all
the data. Even if you HAVE overwritten the Windows partitions you may
still be able to recover data.

Did you read the doc pages on multi-booting?

Let us know what the fdisk output shows.

[ke...@mclaughlin.it]

Hello, I have sadly been confronted with the exact same problem. I followed the given steps only to find out that no windows of any form or kind is present on the drive :(. Since there has been no further steps on how to proceed with this case I desperately am asking for help.
Thank you for any response.

[robcoh...@gmail.com]

For future reference, you should always back up important data.

That said, if you accidentally deleted important data, you should determine first what that data was valued at in monetary terms (including time spent).

Once you know the cost of the data, you should consider hiring someone to recover it. This is not a trivial task, and where I am from data recovery services can be expensive.

If the data was worth more than a few thousand USD, then it may make sense to hire someone.

You can see references to some software you could try if this this too expensive here: https://www.data-medics.com/recovery/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Data-Recovery-Procedure.png

Data recovery is typically a very specialized skill. I am a GIAC certified forensics analyst, and I would not consider myself an expert in data recovery.

Best of luck.