[[WotS] Apples]

Well, stupidity's humanity's nature. Stupidity has struck me again.

I was fooling around and had nothing better to do. So, I decided to install fedora. And I went to the wrong option, by choice and confusion AND stupidity; I think it was something like overriding my whole HD with fedora instead of dual booting it. My question is: is there any way to get it back to its original status ? With/without the files, doesn't matter. Just want it back to Vista. And if I reformat, will it mess up my laptop more than I already have ? Because I've read somewhere that there'd be black screens, deleting partitions, etc., but none of those got through to my head.

If you got confused, just ignore the last part. xD

Help highly appreciated. Thanks.

[midders]

If you got a system restore disk with your laptop, then you can use that to restore it to factory settings. If not, then your best bet would be to ask for one from the people that you bought the laptop from.

Sláinte

midders

[saikee]

Post your current hard disk partition and let us see how terminal is your situation

Command in Fedora

su

following by root password
The partition layout will be displayed if you issue this command

fdisk -l

If you have a recovery partition it will show up as one of the Fat partition at the front end.

If you see a partition with Type 7 then there is hope.

If you can't find a Fat or NTFS partition from the partition it is time to kiss your Vista good bye.

[[WotS] Apples]

Not sure what you mean, but this is what it shows:
Device: /dev/sda1. Boot: *. Start: 1. End: 25. Blocks: 200781. ID: 83. System: Linux.
Device: /dev/sda2. Boot: . Start: 26. End: 19457. Blocks: 156087540. ID: 8e. System: Linux LVM.

[saikee]

Device: /dev/sda1. Boot: *. Start: 1. End: 25. Blocks: 200781. ID: 83. System: Linux.
Device: /dev/sda2. Boot: . Start: 26. End: 19457. Blocks: 156087540. ID: 8e. System: Linux LVM.

Each partition has an Identfication code. For Linux it is 83 and that is shown at your sda1.

You have followed Red Hat/Fedora installer's suggestion and use LVM which comes in as a partition Type 8e.

Your partition table shows no NTFS, which is type 7, so you have nuked your Vista partition when installing Fedora on top of it.

[[WotS] Apples]

Alright, thank you. Reformatting won't help, either ?

[saikee]

Don't know where you come from but when you format a partition you instruct an operating system to destroy the existing "content page" of the partition resulting none of the material inside can be found again.

What you have done was to format your disk into two partitions to install Fedora. Even if Fedora occupies only 1% of your hard disk and so 99% of your Vista insformation may be still there and has not been overwritten but there is no way you can piece them together again.

When you reformat a hard disk you want it to become completely empty. That is the whole idea of formatting!