I reformatted a ntfs drive to fat32, meaning to only reformat one partition on the drive. Because the partition table is overwritten I cannot simply restore the old partition table. Any thoughts on tools that I can use to manually re-create the partitions and save the data?
View 2 RepliesIs there a difference between using GPT partition table when formating hard drives and MS-DOS partition table? What are the advantages/disadvantages of using either?
View 2 Replies View Relatedway to recreate /boot partition for Fedora 13.
For some reason my system crash yesterday and I had to power down the machine (the only bit of information I still remember it mentioned CPU2 stop for few seconds). The next day my system only shows grub console. I tried to mount the partition but failed. here's what i tried
Code:
# mount -t ext4 /dev/dm-1 /mnt/oldboot
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/XXXXXX,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
[Code].....
How do I recreate an LVM raid 1 partition, without destroying data on the discs? I have a 650GB data partition which is a raid 1 array with ext3. Two days ago, the system (Ubuntu 9.04) started to refuse to write to it, claiming no space left on device - even if there is ca. 102GB free left, if the disk is 85% full (according to df)! Interestingly, removing a couple of GB did not help, after reboot the disk was again full..
I did the "tune2fs -m 0" trick and then forced file check on next reboot by "sudo touch /forcefsck" .. and the result is that the raid partition is gone. I have the two physical drives /dev/sd*, unmounted, but the /dev/md1 is no longer there. What can I do to re-create it, without losing the data? I realized that I ran tune2fs on the physical partitions /dev/sd* - was I supposed to run it on /dev/md1?
Accidentally, I deleted my '/etc' & '/bin' folder (i know, my fault). Then, I boot liveCD and tried to copy or fix this issue. And then when I can't figure nothing to fix it, I don't know why, I want install system on my existing system, and I thought that new installation don't touch and change my /home folder. And this step Was my biggest mistake, after this I get raw /home partition without my data. Now, I'm trying recovery my data from /home, and I don't know how do this. I'm using program testdisk but I don't know how it work with lvm and ext4. Can I recover content of '/home' or it's impossible?
View 2 Replies View RelatedWhile attempting to install FC12, Anaconda took it upon itself to overwrite the partition on my backup disk. Now I need to figure out if there's a way to get at least some of my data back. If there's a better place for this question, please let me know and I will happily move it. Using Linux since 1993, other Unixoid systems since 1986. I bought this machine back in 2004 or so. It was a pretty decent machine back then, but it's showing its age now: 370Mb of RAM, 2 hard disks with 80Gb and 120Gb (I don't think the other specs are relevant, but just let me know if I'm wrong). In a fit of insanity, I decided to install Gentoo on it. Don't get me wrong: I love certain things about Gentoo. But the constant fiddling that's required, while it can be fun at first, gets old kinda quick.
So various and sundry things have been going wrong with it here and there (CD-ROM, sound card, etc ad infinitum), and, finally, it wouldn't even load X any more (almost certainly some final Gentoo update which broke something) and I said "screw it, I'll just put Fedora on it." This is what I use at work, and plus I have a good friend who has far more patience with admin stuff than I do and Fedora is what he knows. So, last night, I pick up an FC12 CD that I have lying around and decide to finally just reinstall the whole thing. I went so far as to buy myself a Passport USB drive, 319Gb, and have been backing up up all my stuff very regularly to that drive. I go through one final cycle of backing up and verifying before I start the reinstall.
So my drive is solid, and contains everything I could possibly need (and probably quite a bit of stuff I don't). After booting into FC12, I used Palimpsest to explore the partitions on the existing hard disks. Not sure which was which, I mounted the Passport, where I have cleverly saved a copy of my fstab. Using this, I can see which of my partitions were /boot, /, /home, etc. Most of my personal data has been put into separate partitions so that I could reinstall without blowing away the data. I hope that I can do that there, but, if I can't, no matter: I have a backup. I find some bits of empty space and delete a few of the partitions and recreate them, consolidating the empty space. Still confident in my backup, of course.
So I run Anaconda. Nothing happens. Eventually, I figure out that it won't run the graphical interface because I don't have enough memory. I can use the text version, no biggie. It gets to the part about the disks. I tell it which hard disk to install itself onto. For some reason I think it's going to pop up and ask me about the existing partitions and whether I want to keep them or rewrite them (maybe that's a previous version of Anaconda? or a different installer altogether, who can remember). It does not. It babbles something at me about LVM (which I've personally never really used before), and then promptly locks up. Obviously standard Fedora on a low-RAM machine like this is doomed to failure.
I poke around on the Internet, and I eventually stumble on the Fedora "spins" and select FC13/LXDE. Hopefully this will have better luck. Reboot with the new CD, take a look at my hard disks. It has completely overwritten the old partitions, replacing them with LVM partitions. But not a big deal: I have a backup. Take a look at the Passport. Its ext2 filesys has also been replaced with an LVM partition. Proceed to beat head against wall. So, obviously what happened is, since I (foolishly) had the backup drive mounted at the time I ran Anaconda, it assumed I wanted it to take over that drive as well, and just formatted everything it could lay hands on as LVM. It certainly never asked me my opinion on the matter.
But, fine, I shouldn't have had it mounted. The question is, what do I do now? My first, panicked instinct, was to just set the partition type back to 83 (I believe LVM is 8E), which I did (using cfdisk). That might have made it worse; I dunno. But I'm pretty sure I haven't written anything else to the disk since then. I've tried testdisk (nothing useful; although it can seemingly find the underlying deleted partition, it won't actually do anything with it), and a bevvy of Windows Linux recovery programs (Stellar Phoenix, DiskInternals, Raise, and R-Linux), all of which were completely useless except for R-Linux, which scanned the disk for eight hours and was still going when I had to interrupt it (I may come back to that one, but so far it doesn't look too promising).
My primary problem is that I can't make an image of the disk because this little Passport is the biggest hard drive in the house. I would certainly feel better if I could image everything off it and then play with the image. But, of course, it doesn't matter that very little of that 319Gb was actually being used: I still need 319Gb worth of space to make an image. I ordered another (larger) Passport, which should be here Wed. Once I have that I believe I can do something like so:
Code:
dd ifs=/dev/sdX ofs=/mnt/bigpassport/smallpassport.img bs=512
Right? Then I can muck about with that image in some amount of safety.
Of course, I also have the original hard drives, which are not so large. testdisk can identify the original partitions on those too, but, again, won't actually do anything with them. If I could find something that would image just the partitions I care about, I could probably save those as well, but I don't have any other external hard drives with 120Gb of space free. Can I somehow take the info that testdisk is giving me about those original partitions and use dd to get only that part of the image? Are there other recovery tools I haven't considered? I have a Windows (Win7) laptop, a Linux laptop (FC10, I think), although its power cord is flaky so it's not too reliable, a smaller Mac, a really old Windows box (XP on it, I think), and this formerly-Linux box, which I can only boot off CD's at this point. There's nothing on this disk worth the 500 bux that professional data recovery would charge me, but it's worth a day or two of my life to try to get at least some of it back.
OpenSUSE 11.2 server, Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P sda for system, 3 ext4 partitions, working fine.sdb promise RAID1 for data, 1 ext4 partition, working fine.sdc is an eSATA docking station for data backup, 1 encrypted ext4 partition -- here lies the problem.
This configuration has been functional for months until I decided to add two more external drives (sdc) to rotate through backups. I had difficulty with encyption on the first new drive and eventually decided to start over. Using the gui Yast Expert Partitioner, I deleted the single partition. That began a real nightmare...
Since deleting the partition, the system detects drives inserted in the docking station, but does not report them (including a different fully functional drive and a brand new unused drive). I have tested all drives on other computers and they function perfectly. I have rebooted the system several times while troubleshooting this issue.
Could not recreate the partition on server (since it does not recognize the drive), so I used Gparted on another computer - it all went without a hitch, formatted ext4. But when I placed the drive in the dock, the drive still was detected but not recognized.
Details:
BIOS lists the eSATA drive
Entering Yast Expert Partitioner, error message follows:
The partitioning on disk /dev/sdc is not readable by the partitioning tool parted, which is used to change the partition table.
You can use the partitions on disk /dev/sdc as they are. You can format them and assign mount points to them, but you cannot add, edit, resize, or remove partitions from that disk with this tool.
Yast partitioner shows drives: sda, sda1, sda2, sda3, sdb, sdb1 sbc is not listed.
# fdisk sdc results in: Unable to open sdc
# dmesg | grep tail reports:
[48442.370779] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdc] Unhandled error code
[48442.370793] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
code....
So how did partition deletion cause this issue, and how do I correct the problem? It is possible that my difficulties encrypting the first new drive are related (it's not my first time doing it successfully). It seems the problem is in the Kernel or configuration. I have invested many hours in forums and on google - tried dozens of possible fixes. I'm beginning to suspect system corruption or a bug, however all other system functions are working perfectly.
I installes Ubunu on my Windows XP pro FD and I need to rcover some files , What is the best way tto recover them?
View 2 Replies View RelatedSo the first 10Gb of a 450GB NTFS partition have just accidently been written over with an Ext4 filesystem that spans the entire partition instead. all foolishness asside, what can be repaired. Now I know Ext4 likes to jot bits of meta-data down (inodes blocks) along the way, and this can be about 5% of drive capacity, that said, there's alot of small text files and stuff, coe files so forth that can surely be recovered
I've looked into magicrescue and testdisk, but they fall into the only two groups to exist:
1) Filesystem independent, that is search almost like a patern - well exactly like a pattern match, to find the header and footer of files.
2) Filesystem recovery tools, like, damaged bootsector, so forth
I need one, that will be able to extract files, Iunderstand this will be a hard task, but.... text files; surely that'll be easy, anyway. This is my backup drive, they''re both WD you see, anyway. This is important, given the coding is ASCII surely.
I was installing opensuse 11.2 in parallel with windows xp.but during installation suddenly power has gone and after that opensuse is giving me the error message corrupt partition.i am also not able to login in xp. so I decide to reinstall windows, I got the error saying "invalid partition table" after the first restart of windows xp installation.
I tried to use windows system recovery console and committing fixmbr and fixboot commands, but didn't work.
i have 2 window partition(1 for windows and 1 for data).i do,nt want to format 2,nd partition.
How can I installed windows?My plan was first to install windows xp, then opensuse again.
I have tried to automate the configuration of a usb drive with not much success.
The problem that I have is that I have a large amount of usb drives that have a partition table of type "loop" and I need to change them to "msdos". The size of the drives vary and I need to use FAT32 or FAT16 file system.
I've tried various partitioning commands and gui applications but cant find one that I can give a one line command to to set the partition table, maximum partition size and file system.
I was reading another thread about someone with a bad partition table and I decided to join this forum. I'm not going to take any drastic actions with the partition (/dev/sda3) in question. I am going to wait for instructions on what to do first. I am not very good with Linux and need some hand holding. System: DELL 4550 Dual-Booted with XP and Ubuntu. Works OK, just no swap. Well, here's what I did: I deleted a partition for Windows XP Pro because it was a trial, and it ran out. I then decided to slide the swap partition for the Ubuntu Linux that I dual-boot into over. (If this was successful, I was going to try expanding the root partition to take up the unused space.) I used Gparted on a CD to do this, as I figured it was safe to do.
I now cannot mount the swap space at bootup (and have to go into a backup version of the OS), although I can use Gparted in Linux to execute the "swapon" command, and it appears that it worked because I now see "swapoff" as an option on the context menu. (I actually don't even need a swap partition, except to hibernate.) If I highlight the swap partition and click on "Drive" on Gparted's menu bar and select "Create Partition Table", it will erase all data on /dev/sda, so how do I fix the bad partition table non-destructively?
Everything is installed and setup on my system, but when I setup my partitions I chose my Windows partition to be bootable. Can I just use cfdisk to toggle the bootable flag so my linux partition is bootable and rewrite the partition table?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI want to change my sda2 partition to ntfs type. i have installed GParted but it is returning a strange type of error. Here is the error dump file...
[Code]...
WARNING: the kernel failed to re-read the partition table on /dev/sda (Device or resource busy). As a result, it may not reflect all of your changes until after reboot. WARNING: the kernel failed to re-read the partition table on /dev/sda (Device or resource busy). As a result, it may not reflect all of your changes until after reboot.
Is there a program that will reread the partition table and update the kernel even if one of the unmodified partitions is mounted? I installed my system on one partition, then I added another with free space. Now I want to format the second partition, but the kernel doesn't know about it yet. I tried sfdisk -R /dev/sda, but it refuses while the root partition is mounted. Is there anyway I can avoid rebooting?
View 2 Replies View RelatedUSB flash disk partition disappeared as well as partition table I'm not sure about the cause
Code:
root@u# less /var/log/syslog
usb 5-1: New USB device found, idVendor=058f, idProduct=1234
usb 5-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[code]....
Where did the partition table go? The device had one ext3 partition something around 4GB(size of USB storage device). I need to restore few files from this device.
I'm trying to clone a Linux install to a different laptop. It's made a little complicated by two facts:
1) The 'new' laptop I'm trying to copy my Linux installation to is actually older and has a smaller hard drive then the computer I'm copying from
2) The computer I'm copying from has both a windows and Linux installation; I only care about the Linux partition.
I figured I would copy only the Linux partition from my primary computer to the laptop, sense the laptop doesn't have a large enough hard drive to copy everything. So I used the DD commands to copy SDA3 (main Linux partition) from my main computer to SDA2 of my laptop. When I came back a few hours later I was surprise to find my laptop trying to reboot itself (I never turned it off). It would keep starting to reboot, failing, and restarting itself. Not too surprising sense its boot partition wasn't changed so it's trying to boot into centos when I copied a redhat partition to it.
The problem is that when I used a redhat boot disk the rescue mode was unable to find a Linux partition to mount. /dev/sda2 exists, but trying to mount it gets the complaint "No such file or directory". "fdisk -l" lists sda1 (the boot sector) and sda2. Sda2 is the correct size and reports Linux LVM for its system. But "fdisk -l /dev/sda2" gives the error message "Disk /dev/sda2 doesn't contain a valid partition table" Did I not clone the drive correctly, or was an error caused due to the boot sector not being copied yet (the laptops boot sector is smaller then my old computers, so I can't copy from old computer to laptop)? Can I salvage the laptops partition table somehow, or do I have to repeat the cloning process? And if I do have to re-clone my computer can anyone tell me what I did wrong the first time so it works this time? I don't care if I copy just the Linux partition or both windows and Linux. Even though my main computer has a larger hard drive I'm only using about half of its available space so it should be possible to copy both partitions if I could ignore the unused sections of the harddrive.
Edit: I used DD to copy a tiny part of the Linux partition from my laptop so I could look at it. Most of it is illegible binary of course, but I scrolled through till I found some text right near the beginning:
Code:
VolGroup00 {
id="F2MWxh-....-BidcLe"
seqno = 1
[code]....
So it seems that the DD command did copy everything over to the laptop, which is good to know. I noticed that it says device="/dev/sda3" right in the middle of the code I just posted. The Linux section of my original computer was SDA3 but I copied it to partition SDA2 of my laptop. So is the problem because the boot partition is for the wrong device? I don't suppose if I modified that one line to say SDA2 it would be able to load correctly? (Not that I know how I would modify the line, short of using the DD command again).
What I believe has happened is that I've corrupted the partition table. Essentially one of my partitions' ending point exceeds the maximum number of cylinders/sectors on my drive.
Essentially I have the same problem as on the thread @ [url] but do not know how to fix this and am afraid to reformat/partition based on sectors without really knowing what I'm doing here.
[code]...
When I try to look at SDA in GParted everything shows up as unallocated (though it's obviously not) and it says
[code]...
In my efforts to resize my BTRFS Partition, I accidentally unmarked my BTRFS partition as being BTRFS, and can't mark it back as I can't find the numeric ID for BTRFS and how to apply.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI'm using Truecrypt to encrypt my Windows 7 OS. I also have unencrypted Ubuntu 10.04 installed on /dev/sda6 on the same hard drive. Since Truecrypt bootloader must be installed in MBR, I have GRUB2 installed on /dev/sda6, so I can use TC bootloader to load GRUB2. When I first install GRUB2 on /dev/sda6, I can use TC bootloader to load Ubuntu. But, if I boot into Windows via TC bootloader, and then later try to boot into Ubuntu, I get the message "no bootable partition found". I have to reinstall GRUB2 onto /dev/sda6, every time after I use windows in order to be able to boot into Ubuntu. It seems that starting Windows somehow overwrites GRUB2. Is there a fix for this?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI installed Ubuntu as shown in the wiki and when I went to restart it gave me a lovely blinking cursor and nothing else. So I held down option, loaded into osx, reinstalled rEFIt and got my menu on startup. Unfortunately, the partition sync tool doesn't seam to be working, it gives me an error: Status: MBR partition table is invalid, partitions overlap. Error: Not Found returned from gptsync.efi
View 9 Replies View RelatedI originally had an Ubuntu partition on my hard drive which occupied about half of it. I installed Windows 7 in the remaining unallocated space and I was planning on doing a grub update from a live cd afterwards. BUT when I looked at my partition table, the space where the ubuntu partition used to be is now unallocated space!
View 5 Replies View RelatedI need to copy partition table for sda, I have 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition on sda. I understand that fdisk cant copy extended partition table and I need to use sfdisk.
Correct me if I am wrong -
1. For primary partitions
Code:
dd if=sda-mbr.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=1 count=64 skip=446 seek=446
2. For extended partition
Code:
sfdisk -d /dev/sda2 > backup-sdX.sf
Where it will store the files after backing them up. I tried SUSE 11.2 DVD, it has back up partition table utility under repairs-advanced options but it suggests saving partition table to floppy. Why it doesnt offer to save it on a removable medium or to CD.
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?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI Inadvertently deleted a good partition while trying to clean up after a 10.10 update install failure that left grub broken and prevented me from using my working Linux partition. (installed 10.4 in a new partition) Used testdisk to restore the deleted partition which resulted in the entire partition table being wiped out.All partions are gone, win Xp, 2 Linux partitions, 2 Linux swap partitions.Testdisk deep search does see the partitions but will not recreate the table.
Is their anything I am doing wrong in Testdisk that it won't write the table?Nothing else has been written to the disk.I very carefully recorded the partition information - is their any way to manually enter?
A couple of years ago, I got a 2TB drive and installed Debian on it.
I used the standard installation procedure, as I recall, and created three partitions, which are shown below in the output of "fdisk":
I have a hard disk with a non standard partition order which is likely to have to have a windows restore done on it. I actually have it the way I want it atm. I am interested in finding out if there is a handy way to back up the partition table, like I can backup the mbr. Where does the partition table hide? 160 Gig Sata hd, btw.
View 7 Replies View RelatedI have a problem with one hard disk,now it says its Unallocated,and i tried to create a new partition on it,but it says that first i need to create a partition table,but when i create one,choosing msdos label,it doesnt to nothing. I used Gparted in Fedora,how can i create a partition table,so i can use my hard disk again?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI know now: I overwrited the mbr with a totally wrong one, and I have no backup.So far as I can recall, I had two primary partitions; the first one for xp, and there were several logical volumes for linux in the second primary partition).None of these partitions are found now, grub reports "Error 22" with the wrong mbr.Can the mbr be corrected/recovered somehow, in a way that all of the original partitions show up again?
I think, the partitions themselves are not damaged, since only the mbr was overwritten.
I suppose a fixmbr command from the recovery console of the xp installation CD would fix the mbr and make the xp system in the first primary partition bootable. Am I right? How about the second primary partition; would fixmbr find that too? (Sorry for the silly questions, but I do not want to commit more mistakes, especially irreversible ones.)
Just now I accidentally used gparted and wiped the partition table on my main hard drive, and now fdisk -l shows nothing! How can i recover my partitions and avoid having to reinstall Gentoo all over again?
View 8 Replies View Related