Installation :: Utility For Recovering Partition Table - Testdisk?
Oct 8, 2010
I had a tri boot of Win 7 /XP and Mint...I was using EasyBCD 2.0 as a boot manager...I booted Mint by configuring the NeoGrub option in Easy BCD..I wanted to uninstall Win 7 and so what I did was the following
1. Edited BCD bootloader settings ...Marked XP as my default and deleted Win 7 entry...
2. Logged out and wiped my Win 7 partition
With my fingers crossed , i rebooted but Easy BCD booted flawlessly with 2 choices XP and Mint(GRUB)...As Easy BCD is not meant for XP, I thought of restoring original NTLDR of XP so that things would be in place and thinking that this cud avoid problems of detection by other Linux OS I deleted manually the Easy BCD menu.lst file and NeoGrub.mbr in my root...That was it , after I rebooted, I got boot screen of EasyBCD but whichever option I select,I got an error message that address not Valid-NTLDR not found or something like that I booted my XP live CD and like many times before ran
1.Fixmbr
2.Fixboot
3.bootcfg /rebuild
After that , now when I reboot , I am getting "Invalid Partition Table" On booting from a linux CD , I can see the files are in place..I have to get boot sector and partition table fixed...
Something bad happened to my partition table,so right now I'm working from a Live CD. My partition table is completely screwed, although the data on the lost partitions hasn't been overwritten. I've been messing around with TestDisk for about an hour, but I still didn't figure out how to fix my problem. Before the crash, I had 5 partitions:
NTFS - 30GB NTFS - 8GB ext4 - 20GB
and here comes the extended partition:
linux swap - 8 GB NTFS - 400GB
TestDisk can see all those five partitions. I can mark swap as Logical, but I can't do so with the 400GB NTFS partition - there is just no selection. Turning on "expert mode" didn't help. I have read about using sfdisk to fix partition table, but I don't think I'm able to do it by myself.
Here's how it looks in TestDisk:
Code:
Disk /dev/sda - 500 GB / 465 GiB - CHS 60802 255 63 Partition Start End Size in sectors D HPFS - NTFS 0 1 1 3915 254 63 62910477 D HPFS - NTFS 3916 0 1 4959 254 63 16771860 [Windows XP]
[code]....
I've filled sizes according to TestDisk's findings. First 3 partitions were OK, the problem lies in the extended partition holding 2 logical ones. By the way, TestDisk is able to enter the 400gb partition and see the files.
I'm not sure exactly how, but somehow one of my partitions was corrupted yesterday (GParted showed it as unallocated space). I tried using testdisk. It found the lost partition, so I happily let it rewrite the partition table. The lost partition did return, but then I found out another partition has disappeared (the one most important to me) and in its place there is an empty NTFS partition and an empty ext3 one (the original was an ext4.
The two new partitions seem to be those that were merged to form the ext4 partition). I tried testdisk again. When I run "testdisk /dev/sda" and choose "Analyse" the incorrect partition table is detected. I tried running "testdisk /dev/sda5" (sda5 is the NTFS partition) and it finds a partition labeled "magic" which is the name of the lost partition but testdisk cannot recover it. I get this:
Code: TestDisk 6.11, Data Recovery Utility, April 2009 Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org> [URL]
Disk /dev/sda5 - 47 GB / 44 GiB - CHS 5823 255 63 The harddisk (47 GB / 44 GiB) seems too small! (< 75 GB / 70 GiB) Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings, BIOS detection...
The following partition can't be recovered: Partition Start End Size in sectors Linux 0 1 1 9137 234 56 146800640 [magic]
EXT4 Large file Sparse superblock, 75 GB / 70 GiB I tried deleting the second partition and moving the one after it so that there is 75GB available but it didn't help. I have lost worth of a year of my work. The worst thing that could ever happen to me!
I was having trouble creating a USB Startup Disk in Ubuntu and used the command:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=1
This was a mistake as my USB flash drive was on /dev/sdc. If I am understanding this correctly, the command above deleted the MBR and the partition table. This disk had a single "/storage" partition on it. I googled a solution and found that the "testdisk" program seems to be the most popular solution for things like this. I ran it, selected an "Intel/PC partition" type, set the partition to a non-bootable primary Linux partition, wrote it, and rebooted.
Whenever I run:
sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /storage
I get:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so
Dmesg shows the following:
[20246.273941] EXT3-fs error (device sdb1): ext3_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 1 not in group (block 0)! [20246.279376] EXT3-fs: group descriptors corrupted!
When I run:
sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb
I get:
Disk /dev/sdb: 400.1 GB, 400088457216 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 48641 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
I have heard of a program recommended by dino99 "testdisk" Its in repos so to install in terminal:
Quote: sudo apt-get install testdisk when installed just type:
Quote: sudo testdisk
in terminal to run, i've no idea how its used, though "(create) Create a new log file", then select drive seems the way forward how would i use this to recover a corrupted memory card / usb driv
My NHD/NAS stopped working. Hoping it was a problem with the network card I pulled the hard drive out of the NHD case and mounted it in an external case. Windows 7 won't mount it, neither will XP, neither will a Mac. The drive shows up in the device manager but won't mount. It sounds fine spinning. Quiet and no different than before. The NHD was a 250GB Iomega black series. The actual drive inside is a Western Digital. I've been planning on trying Ubuntu for a while on an older laptop that really slowed down with XP SP3. Loaded ubuntu up - all went very smoothly. I'm quickly becoming a huge fan of the OS. I plugged in the drive on my new Ubuntu system and it mounted! The drive shows up as 3 drives which I'm assuming are partitions. I can actually access the middle 66 MB drive. It contains what I suspect is the Linux operating system for the NHD.
If I try to access the other two I get a pop-up per: For the 66 mb I can't access - "Error mounting" mount /dev/sdc2: can't read superblock" For the 250 gb I can't access - "Error mounting" mount /dev/sdc4: can't read superblock"
I then tried to run the testdisk utility on the 250 gb drive both using "sudo testdisk /dev/sdc4" and just "sudo testdisk". I've also tried NONE and the INTEL partition. Based on my earlier post and playing around with options I think running it with "sudo testdisk" and INTEL might be the way to go. See the screen shots for the errors and sequence of events. I don't know what to do next - which seems to be something to do with testdisk thinking my drive is a heck of a lot bigger than it is. If testdisk can't fix it - I really need this drive recovered. I had a 2nd drive ready to back up this 250 GB NHD. Never did it. That is a mistake I'll only make once!
I tried to install Ubuntu next to XP. After restart - no XP and no Ubuntu. Something wrong with loader I guess, I see command line prompt (of the loader I guess).
So I restarted from liveCD. But no "Repair Install" option like in XP CD. So, I deleted partition to install again on top of old, then learned a loader possibly could be fixed.
So, the problem is: testdisk cannot restore partition I deleted. I didn't write on disk anything. May be swap space after couple reloads from liveCD corrupted it?
It complains "The harddisk (...) seems to small!", it sees some other partitions and doesn't see what Gparted and Disk Utility.
Let me know the best approach to get back XP running (having Ubuntu would be good too).
Here below are the screen captures for details.
Quich Search results. Can't recover what's found. Why 4 partitions are found? Notice, "The harddisk seems too small !" Could this be a problem? HDD is not Maxtor anymore
The gap is there but no deleted partition shown
Essentially same thing... going for deeper search
Deep Search hasn't recover anything new. And shows same results as Quick Search (2nd testdisc image )Hit "continue"...
Now the partitions shown as deleted because of overlapping. The partition to be recovered is still not in the list.
Anyway, my final goal is to get WinXP back and if possible, install Ubuntu. It's nice that installer still sees the XP. Too bad the loader doesn't. how to get it done.
Unlike during installation of XP, ubuntu doesn't offer to utilize the deleted partition. Is it going to stay empty/unallocated? Forget the empty space, will I get XP running if I continue and install?
Is 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?
I recently accidentally corrupted my windows vista partition whilst trying to extend it via gparted under ubuntu 11.04 and then cancelling it shortly after starting. Resulting in me being unable to boot into vista (I don't have another copy of any windows OS so I'd really like not to have trashed this one )
Looking on gparted now my partition is Fat32(?) and apparently only has 36mb used =/
I'm attempting to add an additional partition through KDE's Partition Manager, but my RAID 0 is not recognized by that program. I'm wondering what partition utility is used during *buntu installation, as this properly recognized my RAID 0, and I was able to successfully manipulate the partitioning scheme.
I am using a 8 GB usb flash to create a F13 Live Media. I created it using the livecd-creator. But when I use it to try to boot, it says "No bootable partition in table". What's wrong? I did some searches on google, but didn't find a solution.
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'm trying to install Ubuntu Netbook 10.10 to an Asus EeePC 1000H (160GB HDD). (I know it will be slow because of Mutter/i945). The usb stick boots just fine but when it comes to the partition part it goes wrong.
I have 3 partitions:Windows 7 (50GB) This will be Ubuntu Netbook (50GB) DATA (60GB)
But the partition manager just shows 160GB of unallocated space. I have tried to reboot and create the partitions with other software (even with GParted LiveCD) but the result is the same.
I messed up a 500GB USB hard drive by confusing it with another drive, accidentally trying to erase it, realizing my error and pulling out the cable in panic. Running Testdisk has found no partitions to fix. Photorec can find most of my files but sorting them out again is going to take weeks. Are there any methods I can use to try and save my folders/file system on the HDD? I'm very much a novice as far as partitions and file systems go.
The system is a Dell 530n. It came preinstalled with Ubuntu 8.04. I didn't care for the way Dell handled its repositories (they don't keep them current) so I installed Ubuntu 10.04.
Now when I select "F12 Boot Options" while the BIOS is bringing things to life, I still get the various boot options, however, when I select "Utility Partition" all I get is "Not found. No boot device available."
For those not familiar, the Dell Utility Partition is a hidden partition that has various utilities to help troubleshoot hardware problems.
I have just installed the newest Debian Stable 7.8 release on my new notebook. Before installation I had to free some disk space from the preinstalled Windows7 with ntfsresize and fdisk. In addition to the existing three primary partitions I created an extended one with three logical partitions for /(root) /home and swap, see the output of 'fdisk -lu'
For some reason I put a bootable flag on sda7, and the only small concern during installation was that some BIOS systems might not work with boot-flag no logical drives. Now, every time I boot I get this "Invalid partition table!' message which I must 'enter" away before I get to the GRUB menu.
I'm trying to install Fedora 10 from a USB memory stick on which i've installed Fedora-10-x86_64-DVD.iso and, early in the process of configuring the installation, i get messages about both my IDE hard drives having unrecognizable partition tables:
"The partition table on device sda (... my disk data ...) was unreadable. To create new partitions it must be initialized, causing the loss of ALL DATA on this drive."
Same for sdb.
My PC currently runs Fedora Core 4 (yes i know i should have gotten around to upgrading my OS earlier) and yes it recognizes both hard drives just fine.
The answers I've found on the web suggest to backup my drives and repartition. I'm not too hot on that "solution".
explain why a F4 partition table is not recognized by F10?
BTW, I've recently upgraded my motherboard, processor, DVD drive, regrouped both my IDE drives on the same bus, ... I consider it a miracle F4 still runs on this PC (although F4 does not support the motherboard's graphics card, so no X11).
I'm trying to install Ubuntu Linux 10.04 on my computer with following specs:
ASUS P5KR Mobo HIS 2600XT GFX 160 GB Hitachi Harddisk (SATA) 500 GB Hitachi Harddisk (SATA) - Only for Data.
The 160 GB Harddisk is currently split into 3 main partitions: i) 200 MB created by Win7 setup.
1) Windows 7
2) Leopard OSX
3) Partition formatted in Leopard as Journal which is empty, meaning I can convert this if I want and onto which I will install Ubuntu.
My problem is that despite booting up fine, installer starting and working fine, it cannot however detect my partition table, it thinks its unallocated.
The funny thing is that I can mount the partitions and view the data but the installer however can't see it.
This is maybe the 15th time I've installed an Ubuntu OS in the past two years, and it's the first time I've really been stuck.Not long ago I installed 10.10, with no problems, but a couple days ago I did a fresh install of windows 7, and I planned to re-install ubuntu 10.10 alongside it.Before I installed windows, I created a partition on my 320gb HD, half and half, but while doing this I noticed that gparted would crash if a USB key was plugged in. I mention this because I'm convinced this is related to the problem.
After having installed windows, I went and created a bootable usb key with 10.10 using unetbootin (which I've used once before, but along time ago). I'm unable to make an actual live CD because my disk drive has been broken for the past year - a fact that has never stopped me from installing different distros with a usb key.So the installer starts as usual, but after the 2nd (or 3rd) step (where it says "for best results, make sure that your computer is plugged in, that you have an internet connection, and at least [...] of free space), I click forward, and the little wheel just spins forever,it never advances.I tried everything again with 10.04.1 and I got the same thing, this time after choosing my keyboard layout.
When I simply go to the live distro and then go to install, I see that at that moment, there's a crash report, something about gparted, which I'm assuming is a built-in part of the next step.
To sum up -gparted doesn't seem to like USB keys
-installer won't advance to partition table
-can't use a disk because drive is broken!
My computer is an Acer Aspire 4530, AMD64. The 10.10 and the 10.04.1 installations were both 64bit.
I was using testdisk to recover one of my lost partition and when I rebooted my system it says , "error unknown filesystem ".I am giving a screenshot of gparted
I have stupidly and inadvertently formatted my home partition on my other system while trying to 'downgrade' to Ubuntu 9.10. I have isolated the hard drive and am currently using Testdisk to discover the partitions on there. The scan hasn't yet finished however it appears there are two entries of each partition.
Here: Linux 0 1 1 4012 254 57 64468776 Linux 0 1 1 4012 254 57 64468776 Linux 4013 0 1 14032 254 59 160971296 Linux 4013 0 1 14032 254 59 160971296 Linux 9079 0 1 14032 254 61 79586008 [home] Linux 9079 0 1 14032 254 61 79586008 [home]
When attempting the downgrade, I was wanting to keep the home folder (and root and swap) all at the same size. I am pretty sure I fouled up by trying to revert the file system type to ext3 from ext4. Which partition out of the two 'home' ones, I should be attempting to keep? I cannot see a difference between them but this is how testdisk has reported the drive. Apart from the standard 'back up everything next time' and more fitting for me 'pack up your PC and never use it again!', does anyone have any specific advice on recovering my original home partition?
I have a Toshiba laptop, running Vista Home Premium SP2 with AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor, 1 gb ram & 150 gb HDD. I just shrunk the c: drive down to 92 gb to free up 43.5 gb so as to load the Fedora Linux OS into this free space & have a dual-boot configur'n. My problem is the partition table in the MBR. It shows 4 partitions there, so the fedora 13 Live CD which I use to install the OS cannot find a free spot in the partition table. I have the Ultimate Boot CD so I took a look at the MBR. Here are the 4 partitions that occupies its table:
c: is 17% free, d: is 99% free, the other two are 100% free Can you explain what is the purpose of D: ? How about the other two (with no drive letter)? I read somewhere that 'x17' code means 'hidden IFS (ex: HPFS)' & 'x27' means a rescue partition... true?
Would I be safe in replacing the partition table entry for #1, 3 or 4 with an entry for my Linux? (I have an editor that could modify the MBR). Or would it be better to leave MBR alone, put a boot program on a CD or USB stick, which boots Linux from the unallocated 'partition'? (have to somehow manually install Linux to the 43.5 gb area that I freed up).
then I used dd to transfer data from the old drive to the new drive. Now I am unable to boot into the new drive. I tried to boot again from the live-CD but fdisk reports that the drive has no partition table. I can still mount the devices (e.g. mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3) and I can see all the files. But without a partition table, I can't set one partition to be bootable. Why doesn't gparted create a partition table? it created the filesystems just fine. how do I boot into the new disk? What do I have to do to make grub handle the new disk?
Using ubuntu minimal install 9.10 for a htpc. My boot drive is a 2Gb disk on module. When using advanced install I am eventually given the option to format the drive and ultimately the option to pick what sort of partition table type. I am not sure what to pick; it appears to have msdos as a default. Here are my options:
aix amiga bsd dvh gpt mac msdos (default?) pc98 sun loop
Some appear to be obviously bad choices; but I am not sure. Any ideas on which would be a better pick for me? I have already used msdos and it seems to work fine.
I'm trying to install Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 on my Eee PC 1015PE. but it appears that GParted which is used to partition the HDD is unable to successfully display partition table, it just shows that /dev/sda is all unallocated, and it offers just to create new partition table.
I resized my root partition yesterday to make it include the unused 28GB at the end of my drive, but something went wrong and now I can't mount it again.. I think this has to do with the computer coming with Vista preinstalled and the partitions not being aligned to cylinders. This is what the partition table looked like before the resize (according to fdisk):
Code:
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0xdec3533c
[code]....
None of the last two partition schemes works, when I try to mount sda6 I get an error saying that the XFS superblock contains an invalid magic number. I've tried running xfs_repair on it, but even though it found a few secondary superblocks it couldn't verify them. I've tried running testdisk with the "Cylinder boundary" option set to "no", but it would not find my root partition... The log from the search is here I don't really care about the other partitions, all I need is my old root partition so that I can copy all the important stuff to another drive and then start from scratch with a new partition table (and remove the recovery partition aswell since I don't need it).
cpuid utility is not compiled with U9.04 and the utility is not available as a package with synaptic - other distributions have it available as rpm . url
I'm trying to define the partition table type (I want to set it to msdos) for an automatic installation using preseeding file. (Why? I want to setup a software RAID 1 with two 2TB disks, by default the installer uses gpt partition tabless on those disks, where it's tricky to install grub(2), as there is no mbr, and the root partition is on a md device) During manual installtion it is possible to set the partition table type (by setting debconf priority to low).
[Code]...
Does anyone know what I have to put in my config file so that a msdos partition table will be created Also any other solution is welcome. I just want to have my root partition on a raid 1 and have grub installed, so that it boots up (No other OS is installed on the boxes. Debian squeeze is used)
