How can I recover deleted pictures and videos from Ubuntu/Linux if I update my computer to Windows 7?

Did you reformat the ubuntu partition and install windows over it? If not you can use the ubuntu live cd to access the files and copy them off. If you did reformat the ubuntu partition you can try this link or google for "recover files after reformat". The more you use your window system the more you will decrease your chances of recovering the files because you will be overwriting more and more of those files. Good luck

Unless your up for a good bit of work they are gone. Windows doesn't do a real format so the files still exist on your drive. The problem is Linux uses a different format than windows. This means most recovery software that runs in windows will not know how to piece your files back together or even recognize that there are files there. In Linux you can use what's called a sector editor by booting up in a live CD, then installing the sector editor and piecing the files back together and then copying them to a thumb drive or other device. This requires a bit of skill however. How successful you are can also depend on how fragmented the drive is. Linux is a whole lot better than windows about fragmentation but fragmentation does occur in Linux. As such only an expert is going to be able to find anything not contiguous on the file system. One possible option is to DD the drive (that is use the DD utility from a live CD) copying it to an external drive. Then using a windows file recovery system on the external drive. When you copy it to the external drive the file systems will be translated to whatever you have formated the drive as and to the windows software it looks like a giant text file. Any files or sections of files that were overwrriten are gone. There are file recovery programs, none for free that I know of which claim to be able to read both NTFS and ext file systems but they tend to be a bit iffy. Some are also actually trojaned. So be careful about which one you purchase if you go that route.