I have Ubuntu 10.04 and WinXP SP3 multiboot. I have 3 partitions:

1) NTFS, WinXP (defunct)
2) ReiserFS (+ extra swap partition) Ubuntu
3) NTFS, Storage (lots of my windows projects stored there)

Few days ago, my WinXP stopped working, no way to boot it, something went so terribly wrong, and from the previous long year experience with windows I could simply sense when the time for total reinstall has come. Since I have started with Ubuntu 9.04 my GRUB was the legacy mode GRUB, so I prepared an Ubuntu 9.04 live cd to be able to reinstall GRUB after installing WinXP, and naturally: I though I was ready for the operation.

I booted from the Windows XP SP3 installation DVD, selected partition C (NTFS) to be reformatted and chosen as destination. Everything went smooth, C was erased, new Windows appeared on it, I rebooted the computer, and was happy to see that everything is there..

Or at least I thought so.

The system was missing my partition E, or my Storage partition. It was wiped out. Storage manager denoted it as unallocated space. A quick reboot into Ubuntu ended up with same knowledge: Unallocated space.

No space for panic. Google comes, google helps. I found a marvelous little command line tool which was able to revamp my Storage NTFS partition in about 10 seconds. It’s called testdisk.

Open your synaptic, type testdisk, install it.

Open terminal, type
<pre>
$ sudo testdisk
</pre>

1) Now on the first screen select [ Create ] ( Create a new log file ).
2) From listed hard discs select the one that you need to salvage. Then [Proceed].
3) Then [Continue].
4) Then [Intel] – this works in most cases, but if you have some other exotic partition types, you can tell testdisk which one it is on this screen.
5) Then [Analyse].
6) Then [Quick Search] – this will do most of the time. But if corruption was more severe, you might need to select another round of ‘deeper search’.
7) On the next screen select Vista [Y/N] – N, if you used WinXP to create the controversial partition.
8) — disregard the stupid smiley –  Now you will see all partitions that testdisk was able to identify. Press Enter (continue).
9) Ok finally – if you are happy with the results, ie. you see your lost partition in the list, select  [ Write ] and reboot (you will be informed about that on the next screen anyway). But if testdisk wasn’t able to dig out the lost partition, then select [ Deeper Search ].

It saved my night. And a lot of data. I think this tool exists for windows as well. Check it out, remember it. It will come handy sooner or later!

[EDIT]
Yep, TestDisk runs on several platforms – check it out:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I had to deal with this twice.
First time it was when I upgraded my Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. Everything was fine, except: my 2496 Audiophile stopped playing any sound at all. Daemon.log didn’t show any errors coming from pulse, I could clearly kill and start it without any errors whatsoever. So,  I let my xmms play a song, went to  the Pulse configuration, to see if xmms gets registered as a valid audio stream. Guess what, the bars (vu-meters) were pulsing left to right decently meaning that sound was actually been streamed.
But still I couldn’t hear a thing.
I then tried changing the chosen output device profile in Preferences -> Sound -> Hardware -> Profile, but none of them helped. Googling around showed that dozens of people have experienced the same problem, and that there was not only ONE problem, but sometimes 2-3 different problems which pretty much looked alike.

Here are shortly the 2 problems I saw people complained about:

1. Ubuntu didn’t recognize hardware / didn’t load any drivers whatsoever
2. Ubuntu recognized the driver but still no sound coming out

My problem belonged to the second group.

Solutions for this problem were mostly these:

Solution #1

create /etc/udev/rules.d/yourown_ice1712.rules file and copy into it:

SUBSYSTEM!="sound", GOTO="ice1712_end"
ACTION!="change", GOTO="ice1712_end"
KERNEL!="card*", GOTO="ice1712_end"
SUBSYSTEMS=="pci", ATTRS{vendor}=="0x1412", ATTRS{device}=="0x1712", ATTRS{subsystem_vendor}=="0x1412", ATTRS{subsystem_device}=="0xd634", ENV{PULSE_PROFILE_SET}="via-ice1712.conf"
LABEL="ice1712_end"

Then edit another file: /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/via-ice1712.conf
and copy/paste the contents from: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/34620379/via-ice1712.conf

After this you should restart Pulse:

$ pulseaudio --kill
$ pulseaudio --start

This helped some people but it did not help me. So I’ve searched on.
Maybe it will fix your yours though, don’t know give it a try. Here is the link:https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/178442 to the complete discussion thread which is PRICELESS if you have sound problems with Koala.

Solution #2

The solution to my problem was much simpler than the aforementioned! I simply had to instruct Pulse to expect a front device which has 10 channels, by default it expects only 2 channels. Thanks to Asmo (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/178442/comments/65) this was fairly easy to fix. Read the link, or just edit /usr/share/alsa/cards/ICE1712.conf and add to the ICE1712.pcm.front.0{} section these two lines:

slave.format S32_LE
slave.channels 10

A very helpful link I found out there – http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=843012