A few months ago I tried to shrink an NTFS partition using gparted and use the free space to install Haiku. However, gparted crashed in the middle of the resize, leading to a corrupt partition table. I tried to solve the problem myself, using testdisk to detect the partitions. However, the fix is not perfect, and it left me with a partition table that goes "outside" of the disk (i.e. the partition table has allocated more sectors than there actually are on the disk to the last partition).
Recently I need to reinstall Ubuntu Natty, but because the partition table is corrupt, the installer on the Ubuntu Natty Live CD (as well as gparted) see the disk as entirely unpartitioned. What is weird is that the Disk Utility (aka palimpsest), fdisk on my current Natty distro (upgraded from Maverick, which I want to replace with a fresh install), and GRUB 2 see the partitions fine (with some errors, such as listing a few trillion TBs of available space, a result of the corrupt partition table).
I am using an Asus U30Jc laptop with a single 500GB HDD. My current setup is supposed to be like this:
/dev/sda1: A hidden FAT32 recovery partition generated by Windows 7, listed as containing Windows Vista by GRUB 2
/dev/sda2: NTFS partition containing Windows 7 (labeled "OS")
/dev/sda3: Extended partition containing "DATA", Ubuntu, swap, and the erroneous trillions of TBs of space
/dev/sda5: NTFS partition containing user data (labeled "DATA")
/dev/sda6: Ext4 partition containing Ubuntu
/dev/sda7: swap partition
(*Though I'm not supposed to have it, and it isn't listed in /dev while running the Live CD, /dev/sda4 exists as a zero-length partition in the output from sfdisk; not sure why)
Currently I've tried the following:
- testdisk, using "deeper search" and writing the partition table back to disk; produced a (usable) partition table that was bad.
- [URL], fsck didn't do much at all, except raise various errors on all partitions except the one containing Natty.
- [URL], tried to substitute the numbers caljohnsmith gave to thegreat with the corresponding values from my run of fdisk -lu, but because caljohnsmith didn't explain where the values came from and what they meant (no offense to him), I was lost; after the last step (setting the end sector on the extended partition to the last cylinder boundary (which I didn't really understand; tell me if you need details on what I did)), gparted went from showing the trillions of TBs of free space as outside all partitions to showing them as inside the extended partition; this also somehow caused the partitions to overlap.(The error parted raises changed from "Error: Can't have a partition outside the disk!" to "Error: Can't have overlapping partitions.
Running fdisk from the Natty Live CD gives
Code:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -lu
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x74ef0aca
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 34812854 17405403+ 1c Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 * 34812855 279000854 122094000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 279000855 976768064 348883605 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 279000918 875204030 298101556+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 875204608 972859391 48827392 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 972861440 976771055 1954808 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Running sfdisk -l from the Natty Live CD gives
Code:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo sfdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 60801 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 0+ 2166 2167- 17405403+ 1c Hidden W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 * 2167 17366 15200 122094000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 17367 60800 43434 348883605 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda5 17367+ 54478- 37112- 298101556+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 54478+ 60557- 6079- 48827392 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 60557+ 60801- 244- 1954808 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Running parted from the Natty Live CD gives
Code:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo parted /dev/sda print
Error: Can't have overlapping partitions.
This partition belongs to a virtual machine, the partition is not visible when booting this VM using a live CD or attaching it to another VM. When booting anything with this partition attached it takes hours to boot.
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 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 opened GParted to create a new partition on a new drive. He wanted me to create a partition table first which I did, and it was created directly without any prompt like im used to see when creating partition. So I recognized too late, that i actually created a MBR on one of my 6 1TB raid5 drives. Not beeing sure if the ne MBR was really written, I have opened ubuntu disk utility and clicked on the check raid button. It directly made a resync. After the resync, mdadm --detail /dev/md0 told me everything is ok and synced. Then I wanted to mount it with:
mount /dev/md0 /mnt Then I get the following error: "mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/md0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so" I think I just killed my raid5 ;(
I shouldnt work on my server when im tired and when I actually have no time ;( My last hope is the fact, that "Disk Utility" shows that there is a .0 TB ext4 volume on my raid (see screen below) [URL]
I used to have a 1TB external drive with lots of stuff on it. But after a reported drive failure during a F11 install the partition table seems to have been lost. (I think F11 toasted it)
Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000215724032 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121602 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
[code]....
The drive used to have xfs and a partition. Is there any way to rebuild the partition? Or is my 1TB of data gone forever? The drives seem to be fine now... I just want to get it up enough to either pull any data or just to get a file list. Most of the stuff on the drive was from somewhere else.(ie 300GB of NRN data for all of North America.
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?
both root and home partition have suddenly become corrupt, and the repair tool from the installation disk just loops (Do you want to repair? Yes! Do you want to repair? Yes! Do you...).
On my backup drive I can no longer see any files. According to Testdisk program the master file table (MFT) is bad. How do I restore or rebuild the MFT?
I have several drives in an LVM VG/LV and for some reason on reboot, a drive will get a corrupt GTP table. I have killed the entire VG and re-created it without the drive that was showing the problem, then then it just happens to another drive. It does not appear to be the same drive each time either. I've confirmed this by using smartctl to check the SN of the drive reporting a corrupted table. It's not always the same drive.
I have swapped around cables to the two controllers to see if I could pin-point which cable or port showed the problem and long story short, there was little consistency in it. This simply does not appear to be caused by any single cable, port, controller, or drive.
Code:
parted /dev/sdb print Error: The primary GPT table is corrupt, but the backup appears OK, so that will be used. OK/Cancel?
When I see that and select Ok, it just shows it again. I can do an mklabel and mkpart, then the LVM LV shows up under /dev as it should, without another vgscan. If I then mount that LV, I can see the data is there and it seems Ok despite the warning of mklabel saying it will destroy the data. Logs show no cause during boot. So, what is causing this? Will doing the mklabel kill the data on it? I just don't understand why Ubuntu is randomly corrupting GTP tables.
Code:
Ubuntu 10.10 x64 Mobo: ASUS A8N-SLI - On board NVIDIA nforce4-SLI controller has 4 ports connected to 3 drives in this LVM LV. HighPoint Technologies, Inc. RocketRAID 230x 4 Port SATA-II Controller - Has 4 ports, 3 of which are used in the LVM LV. (Had 4, one is out with an RMA).
I 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?
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
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.
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?
USB 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).
After reboot I saw this communication:Quote:Target filesystem doesn't have requested /sbin/init.No init found. Try passing init= bootarg.and I can't shutdown the system normally because it stops (live cd too).Then I can't repair this partition because it is always busy.
I have recently recovered from an HDD failure on my Drobo. One of the disks died and corrupted the entire array (which is not supposed to happen). I have since managed to copy the data off onto smaller disks and after replacing the failed drive, have copied everything back.
Now that im up and running again, i was wondering how this situation would play out on encrypted disks, or in the case of a drobo a large encrypted partition (as you cannot encrypt the entire array).
Would i still be able to recover the data if i were to encrypt it? It is a 4.2TB array, and i assume that I would need to copy the data in its entirety to recover it, so using multiple smaller disks would be out of the question right?
I just now re-installed 10.04 on my box, but now I can't get back into Windows. I'm getting the BOOTMGR not found error, that I'm familiar with, but the circumstances surrounding it are completely new to me. In the past I've encountered errors from hard-shutdowns where I couldn't mount the partition, until I checked it with windows first, but I can't boot into windows at all any more. I'm pretty sure my grub is pointing to the right location:
After installing the recent kernel update and rebooting my machine I have found a horrible fact, my computer won't boot anymore. It seems my root partition was corrupted, and running fsck on it just sends me through a endless loop of "Ignore Errors {y}:" and "Force overwrite {y}:". I have already tried the use the repair system on the installation DVD but that doesn't do anything, the pop up asking if I want to repair the file system keeps coming up when I click repair.
I 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
Target filesystem doesn't have requested /sbin/init. No init found. Try passing init= bootarg. and I can't shutdown the system normally because it stops (live cd too). Then I can't repair this partition because it is always busy. I have on this partition important files.
I've used rEFIt and to create a dual boot system on a new MacBook Pro 7. 1 following the directions in the community forum. I can book ubuntu and mac os x fine. However, the MBR boot table shows an error in the partition map.
[Code]...
How can I fix this, rEFIt and gptsync are unable to repair the MBR error... Will this cause problems (since MBR shows the ubuntu boot partition overlapping the OSX partition)?
I have a hard drive where one partition is used as part of a logical volume (LV) using LVM. The partition table is corrupted and prevents the partitions from showing as devices in /dev/. The corruption prevents the logical volume from coming on-line b/c LVM cannot find the part on the corrupted disk. I (am pretty sure) I know the block offsets and lengths for each partition on the disk but do not want to write to the disk in case I am wrong.
How do I go about recovering the logical volume in this scenario?
I 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!
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?
