Fedora :: Restore After Mistakenly Wiping The Boot Partition?
Jan 22, 2010
I did a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic on a separate partition the other day, and mistakenly formatted the dedicated boot partition. This has left the boot entry in Fedora's fstab incorrect, and - obviously - removed the initrd and vmlinuz images for Fedora from the boot partition. Is there any way to reinstate these? Someone on the Ubuntu forums recommended chrooting into the Fedora partition, but I'm not sure I understand how that works. It's my own stupid fault for formatting the boot partition, but we live and learn!
Problem concerns HP laptop running XP and Fedora 13 and using Grub2. When installed the grub became the primary bootloader. I have been unable to successfully use any of the common fixes to reload the windows bootloaderWindows install has been unable to reload the windows bootloader. With the grub being primary I cannot access the factory restore partition.Is there a way to disable the grub and force the machine to the restore partition or use a recovery distro to run it? I have tried Knoppix but was unable to access the partition. I am still a linux wbie and understand I may be missing something simple but have yet to resolve the issue and need help. I need to reformat the machine and will run linux from an external usb. At this point all data is backed up and I am open for any options.
I have tried to access the MBR directly but fixing it is beyond my current skill level.Additional details: Initial linux install along-side XP was Mint 9. It completely wiped out the bootloader and failed to install properly. Installed Fedora and it reloaded the grub and fixed the bootloader which allowed the machine to boot and function with both OS's.
What happens when you wipe a hard drive which has a partition that is mounted? I was using ubuntu 9.10 live CD but I had one partition on a hard drive mounted. Then, I started to wipe the entire hard drive with random characters using dd. Only later I realized that I hadn't unmounted that partition. what could have happened? Could the Live CD have been damaged?
I'd like to wipe free space on a fat 32 partition, momentary by doing
Code:
cat /dev/urandom >garbage
That stops each time the file is 4GB big, as this is the maximum supported filesize for fat32 partitions. So I redo the command, only writing now to "garbage2" or so.Is there any more elegant way to do that? Maybe by script which automatically generates new file names, until the disc is full?
I ve got a dual boot, XP and FC 12 on a single harddrive. After defragmentation of NTFS partition (With XP installation) cant'boot linux So, rub statrts with boot menu after selecting linux it tries to load linux but prints out some messages again and again (I do not remember contetn of messages) And these messages are circulating
I'd like to clone a partition, and then restore it to a logical volume. I have all three operating systems at my disposal (Mac, Windows, Linux Live CD) What is the best way to achieve this. The partition I am trying to resize is only 200MB, so I can store it on usb if need be.
what could this bei saved my correct iptables file @ Code: /etc/iptables.up.ruleswhere webmin is looking for it.webmin config is to automaticly boot this file and addes a line at.
Laptop has a fault and needs to go back to dell. I have no idea what they may or may not do it; regardless I want to completely wipe the hard drive (and then put windows back on to keep them happy).
I'm having trouble since I installed the newest kernel update. I only have one desktop. I unistalled compiz. Then I get the message 'you don't appear to have a window manager installed' I reinstalled compiz, but it gives me a misty screen, with the cube desktop. How do I set compiz to a default setting? Plain and simple? Where is the config file? This may have started when I clicked a box 'enable indirect rendering' just to see what happened. I have an nvidia 9200 card on an Asus laptop.Failing that, how do I reinstall Fed 12 without wiping out my home directory?
I have Debian installed and I want to install Fedora. Is there a way to install Fedora without erasing the drives? I have my /home directory that don't want erased, plus several GB of files stored in other partitions as well as other drives.
If not, then is there a fast and easy way to back up everything?
I had an Ubuntu desktop 9.04. While I wanted to format my second hard drive with gparted, I have selected my system HD () with all my datas (/home, ...).In fact, my error is I have selected to rebuild my partition table and now I have lost all partitions . I would like to know how to restore my datas.
I was dicking around today and I deleted an LVM partition, is there anyway I can restore the partition and add it back to my volume group or is it game over?
I have recently setup a dual boot system that consist of Windows Vista and Fedora 12, I am looking for a solution that will allow me to create an entire restore image for both OS's on an external hard drive. I am looking for something that is easy to use, stable, and free. I have looked at clonezilla and have used Norton ghost 2003 in the past which is not supported with Windows Vista.
My /boot folder is deleted by an unwanted mistake. I'm using F14 x64. I have updated my OS and I also installed more than 2 GB packages and It is very difficult for me to re install Fedora. Is there any way to fix this problem with out re installing Fedora?
I have a problem I don't know how to solve. Today I bought a netbook and while waiting for the new Ubuntu Unity release to come out, I thought of trying out Crunchbang instead of Windows that came with it. Browsing on my Ubuntu desktop machine, I found a guide for making Crunchbang live USB stick, and i followed the procedure. However, I made a very stupid mistake. The guide said I should enter the command: sudo dd if=/path/to/iso/crunchbang-10-alpha-01-openbox-i686.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M;sync
where "of=...." part should be replaced with the name of the HDD. I forgot that I have an external HDD mounted and mistakenly copied the data to it. After this, I cannot see the content of my external HDD anymore. Instead, i have this 620mb large Crunchbang-install device.
I know what I did was stupid, but is there a way to get the content of my HDD back? I have some valuable data on it.
I'm running 11.04 with Unity and enabled Desktop Cube in Compiz Settings Manager. I ended up disabling services, i think "largedesktop" and enabling others like OpenGL and composite. Anyway, unity no longer works including the bar above and the icons to the left. Any idea how I can fix this?
I was attempting to format a flash drive, and well, used the wrong sdX device. I've run DiskInternals Partition Recovery tool, and all my files are still there (you have to pay $139 to have it restore the files). Is there any way using tools in linux to restore the ntfs partition/files? It was a single disk with the partition taking the entire drive. I've tried mounting it with the -t option, but it says invalid ntfs signature. Man, two lessons the hard way, make sure you backup (duh) and be careful what you type as root.
I've got an 8-disk raid-5 setup, and one of the disks failed. I shut the system down, replaced it, and powered the box back on again. Then, I made a catastrophic mistake; I 'failed' and removed the wrong disk (should have been sdj1, and I typed sdk1 by accident). I tried to re-add sdk1 back to the raid array, but it got listed as 'spare'. My raid array is off-line, since I now have 2 disks unavailable.
I know that the data still exists on sdk1, is there any way I can get the raid array to recognise the fact that it's a valid part of the array, and not a spare disk? At least if I can do that, I'll have a degraded but accessible array, and then I can rebuild the array on the properly replaced disk.
My most recent F11 -> F12 was a near-fiasco, because I had the bad luck of foolishly having two distinct physical drives in the same system, where the /(root) partition on each drive had exact same UUID (result of partition cloning and neglect to change the UUID on the copy)
BUT! the UUID redundancy was not the initial trigger of my problems (its near-disastrousness played itself out only while I was REMEDYING the initial problem). The initial trigger: insufficient space on my /boot partition. "preupgrade" neglected to properly assess the space and/or warn me about it before proceeding.
In addition, the automatic cycling out of grub kernel entries came to bite me (part of many factors of the near-fiasco) because after the unfinished upgrade i had only one working kernel left to boot into, until I messed up that remaining one (too long a story), and then grub-install messed up my booting because of duplicate UUID. At any rate, at the end of what looked like a good preupgrade-reboot-upgrade-package-install process the post-install phase lingered a looong time, then I found myself booted into the old Fedora 11 kernel with absolutely NO modules (corresponding /lib/modules had been erased by the upgrade!) Somehow the system ran, but no USB, no wifi, no ethernet, no way to easily place the right kernel rpm onto the hard drive (had to unscrew the drive,etc., to copy over the correct kernel rpm). (Plus, file /boot/preupgrade/vmlinuz, left over from the arrested upgrade, was NOT the right target upgrade kernel version (2.6.32.9-70.fc12), so it didn't help either because it didn't have its modules either. The target /lib/modules (version 2.6.32.9-70.fc12) WERE there, but the kernel itself was NOT, due to upgrade running out of space on the /boot partition).
(Oh, and the preupgrade/upgrade had deleted my /var/cache/yum/preupgrade/ packages; hence my inability to quickly (re)install the 2.6.32.9-70.fc12 kernel rpm -- why!? it hadn't successfully finished the process!)
(Also, FWIW, i ended up rescuing the system through "rpm -i --force <kernel>", many an F12 rescue boot, chrooting, /boot/grub/grub.conf & fstab edits, tune2fs/uuidgen, running grub on command-line ("setup (hd0)"), etc., etc.)
So, any tips out there on phasing out the old-school /boot partition scheme, the safest and easiest way (without destroying a working system, of course)?
After installing another OS on second drive, UUID for swap on my main system was missing. In other words there is no appropriate symlink in /dev/disk/. I've tried to create it manually, but it dissappears again after rebooting. Temporarily i solved this problem by adding in /etc/fstab direct address to swap device. The question is how to restore UUID for swap partition correctly? Code: sudo blkid /dev/sda6 /dev/sda6: TYPE="swap" /dev/sda6 is swap partition. Also i've tried to use tune2fs:
I got swap space full error and the ubuntu version of "blue screen of death". I used Disk Utilities to delete a 2.1GB unused partition. When I tried to create a swap space partition (with Disk Utilities) it failed. In the mean time ubuntu did some security updates. When I tried to create again Disk Uilities did not complain but only created a small ~ 500 kB partition. I deleted that and reboot and got "unknown filesystem grub rescue>". I booted from a USB key successfully. Now Disk Utilities and File Browser can see all the partitions and files on the hard drive, but GParted thinks the entire hard drive is unallocated. I vaguely remember that there are two partition table on the hard drive. It may be that one of them was deleted (when I removed the ~ 500 kB partition with Disk Utilities earlier maybe?). It seems at least the other partition table is still intact since Disk Utilities and File Browser can still see all the partitions and files. Is it possible to restore the deleted or damaged partition table and make the hard drive bootable again?
On my computer on the first disk /dev/sda was installed win2k system bootable with native win2k bootloader. I created imges of that partition using Ghost4linux na Clonezilla. Images were placed on the second computer using sshfs. For all this tasks i used PartedImage LiveCD.
I removed old partition and created a new ntfs partition on the same disk. When I used GParted or native Win2k partitioner the partition I get was smaller: the difference is a few bytes. Finally I used the Linux fdisk. Now the size was OK, but after restoration win2k was unbootable: I tried to recover the win2k but it was even impossible to locate a system on the partition. So I tried to move all the partition at the very beginning of the disk. Now at least I was able to mount (under Linux) the partition. But again win2k was unbootable and unrecoverable.
It seems for me that the partition is missplaced. According to Ghost4Linux the partition begins with an offset 0x56. I suspect that it should be rather 0x80.
I recently tried to make a backup of an ntfs partition using dd.For example.. "sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sda1" which made a copy of one partition to another, not realizing that it would wipe the ntfs filesystem and image across the linux partition. Is there anyway i can undo this to get back all the data which was on the ntfs drive? Cfdisk still sees the partition as NTFS. Have also tried photorec to try to retrieve the data but to no avail.
I am about to install a test machine for testing out system configurations and software modifications.Instead of installing a virtual machine I wish to create a secondary partition which holds a "restore image" of the "clean" system. Also I would like to be able to select a system restore function in Grub while booting.
my /dev/sdb was a truecrypt partition that was mounted when I accidentally deleted the partition in gparted (instead of sdc, stupid). I'm pretty sure I haven't overwritten anything since then, but I'm not sure how to go about recovering this one. To confound the problem, the only way I can install stuff to my ubunut machine is by downloading on a windows machine and transferring by memory stick.
I have searched and didnt find a situation like mine so i thought id ask. i have a dual boot setup on my hp pavillion windows vista /dev/sda1 and backtrack linux 3,while trying to install backtrack 4 (which is ubuntu based) i deleted the former partitons for bt3. im not quite sure what i clicked but using the ubiquity installer it deleted my partition table so now my entire drive is listed as unallocated space. i have some very important files on my windows partition other wise i would just format and start over. how can i restore the partition table and boot to windows to atleast grab the important stuff. the drive hasnt been formatted so the info is still there i just cant get to it anyone have any ideas?
I was working on creating a partition on a new hard drive I was planning on using for storage. I wasn't paying attention and chose to delete the partition on my master. I am running a dual boot with Vista and Ubuntu. When I rebooted It will only go to the Grub> prompt. Ive ran TestDisk and though that I had corrected the problem but it didnt. After running TestDisk again here is what It came up with.
Disk /dev/sda - 320 GB / 298 GiB - CHS 38914 255 63 Partition Start End Size in sectors L HPFS - NTFS 0 32 33 28554 254 63 458734027 L Linux 28555 1 1 38585 254 63 161147952 L Linux Swap 38586 1 1 38912 254 63 5253192 Structure: Ok. Use Up/Down Arrow keys to select partition. Use Left/Right Arrow keys to CHANGE partition characteristics: code....
After writing the table above I rebooted. Windows prompted me for my restore disk. I rebooted to the live cd again and ran Fdisk.
Ive installed ubuntu for the first time today, i have a hdd of 500gb, that had 65gb occupied with music, movies and games.
What i did during installation:
it asked me where to install it, so i created a new partition of 100gb ext4 type, to install it there, and i was going to leave the rest for the data, but it wont let me do it, so i went back and selected the "exchange type swap linux 0x82 type" for the 400gb partition.
Then installed it, and now i cant find my data, and i have only 100gb of space in the hd, if i use the "disc utility" i can see the other 400gb, and change partition type, but i dont want to lose my data..
what I did was: - have NTFS (450GB + 4GB linux-swap + 44GB ext3 with ubuntu 10.10 upgraded from ubuntu 10.4). Ntfs partition contains data only, no windows.
- either with partition magic or paragon I tried to resize the NTFS and since then parted doesn't like my partitions anymore, but Ubuntu boots and works just fine..
- I took the output from fdisk -l and decided to remove the swap partition - ubuntu won't boot saying it needs the swap (although it was never mounted and i deleted the swap while ubuntu was active)
**NOTE: Since the partitions are not on cylinder boundaries, using parted to recreate the partition table may not be good enough.. I don't have a backup of the partition table.
