I will try to address some of your questions in the last few posts.
The files on the Desktop should be located in the Users\YourUser\Desktop folder.
If you have saved the files you want to keep, you can do a factory re-image and it will put your system back to the factory basic. I am not sure what any other type recovery might do. Too bad you do not have a backup image you made.
Gparted should run just fine. It says it has a capability to recover data, so if you want to try before you do a factory restore, it probably would not hurt, but I have never tried it, so not sure what any error messages might mean. Possibly the fact it is an NTFS partition will mess up GParted. But did you get Gparted to run from the Ubuntu desktop?