[gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[pat]

Hello,

My brother has a second disk where was two partitions formated as NTFS (the
big one) and FAT32 (small one), but something brakes the partition table and
now there are two linux partition tables +/- the size of the previous logical
drives.

Which SW should I use to recover the original partition table? I think about
gpart, but does it has a GUI? I'm not guru at this :-\

I know the next version is to format whole drive, but there are photos of his
daughter and not backup ... .

Thanks a lot for all suggestions !!!

     Pat
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Re: [gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[Michal 'vorner' Vaner]

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Hello

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 12:01:08PM +0100, pat wrote:
> My brother has a second disk where was two partitions formated as NTFS (the
> big one) and FAT32 (small one), but something brakes the partition table and
> now there are two linux partition tables +/- the size of the previous logical
> drives.
> 
> Which SW should I use to recover the original partition table? I think about
> gpart, but does it has a GUI? I'm not guru at this :-\

Recovering will be really hard think, if you do not know the exact
numbers there, it is probably impossible.

But you may be lucky and nothing wrote to the data part. In that case,
it should be relatively easy to save the first partition of the two.
Grab fdisk (the unix one is probably better, it does exactly what you
tell it to do and has better help) and create a single partition over
the whole disk, then mount it read-only (so nothing can get corrupted,
if you do something wrong). You should be able to get the data from
there.

I wish you luck

-- 
When eating an elephant take one bite at a time.
		-- Gen. C. Abrams

Michal 'vorner' Vaner

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Re: [gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:01:08 +0100, pat wrote:

> My brother has a second disk where was two partitions formated as NTFS
> (the big one) and FAT32 (small one), but something brakes the partition
> table and now there are two linux partition tables +/- the size of the
> previous logical drives.
> 
> Which SW should I use to recover the original partition table? I think
> about gpart, but does it has a GUI? I'm not guru at this :-\
> 
> I know the next version is to format whole drive, but there are photos
> of his daughter and not backup ... .

Try photorec from app-admin/testdisk. It should recover most files if the
disk has not been written to since the corruption. No GUI but it does
have a man page :)


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Top Oxymorons Number 30: Business ethics

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Re: [gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[Florian Philipp]

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On Sun, 2008-03-23 at 12:01 +0100, pat wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> My brother has a second disk where was two partitions formated as NTFS (the
> big one) and FAT32 (small one), but something brakes the partition table and
> now there are two linux partition tables +/- the size of the previous logical
> drives.
> 
> Which SW should I use to recover the original partition table? I think about
> gpart, but does it has a GUI? I'm not guru at this :-\
> 
> I know the next version is to format whole drive, but there are photos of his
> daughter and not backup ... .
> 
> Thanks a lot for all suggestions !!!
> 
>      Pat

Try testdisk. It's ncurses-based and easy to use. It saved my sorry arse
twice.

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Re: [gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[Volker Armin Hemmann]

On Sonntag, 23. März 2008, Florian Philipp wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-03-23 at 12:01 +0100, pat wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > My brother has a second disk where was two partitions formated as NTFS
> > (the big one) and FAT32 (small one), but something brakes the partition
> > table and now there are two linux partition tables +/- the size of the
> > previous logical drives.
> >
> > Which SW should I use to recover the original partition table? I think
> > about gpart, but does it has a GUI? I'm not guru at this :-\
> >
> > I know the next version is to format whole drive, but there are photos of
> > his daughter and not backup ... .
> >
> > Thanks a lot for all suggestions !!!
> >
> >      Pat
>
> Try testdisk. It's ncurses-based and easy to use. It saved my sorry arse
> twice.

++
mine once.

testdisk is a very good tool.

try systemrescuecd 
http://www.sysresccd.org

which has testdisk in an even newer version than gentoo.
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Re: [gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Florian Philipp <lists@f_philipp.fastmail.net> wrote:

> Try testdisk. It's ncurses-based and easy to use. It saved my sorry arse
> twice.

ACK. If *just* the partition table is lost, but no damage inside
the individual partitions, testdisk can easily reconstruct it
but looking for superblocks (even w/ FAT). 
Used it several times successfully.

Testdisk folks did a great work :)

cu
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Re: [gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[pat]

Couple of other questions and situation update:
- there were not writes to the disk - this is good I think
- the original disk division was 120GB (NTFS) and 40GB (FAT32) - the fat was
the first one
- and now the sizes are different (the first one around 30GB and the rest)
- is the photorec able to search data in this partition table corruption level?
- I'm going to buy ne disk and to make dd of the corrupted one

Thanks a lot

     Pat


On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:01:08 +0100, pat wrote
> Hello,
> 
> My brother has a second disk where was two partitions formated as 
> NTFS (the big one) and FAT32 (small one), but something brakes the 
> partition table and now there are two linux partition tables +/- the 
> size of the previous logical drives.
> 
> Which SW should I use to recover the original partition table? I 
> think about gpart, but does it has a GUI? I'm not guru at this :-\
> 
> I know the next version is to format whole drive, but there are 
> photos of his daughter and not backup ... .
> 
> Thanks a lot for all suggestions !!!
> 
>      Pat

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Re: [gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[Liviu Andronic]

On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 1:18 PM, pat <pat@xvalheru.org> wrote:
>  - I'm going to buy ne disk and to make dd of the corrupted one

Maybe sys-fs/ddrescue is suited for this job (?).
Liviu
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Re: [gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sunday 23 March 2008, Liviu Andronic wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 1:18 PM, pat <pat@xvalheru.org> wrote:
> >  - I'm going to buy ne disk and to make dd of the corrupted one
>
> Maybe sys-fs/ddrescue is suited for this job (?).
> Liviu

gparted is always the first choice in situations like these. The trick 
is to realize that if you recreate the partition table the way it was 
everything just comes back (assuming no destructive write to the drive 
meanwhile, like mkfs.ntfs...) so all one needs to know is where did the 
old partition end?

gparted can go hunting through a disk looking for that info

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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Re: [gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[Stroller]

On 23 Mar 2008, at 12:18, pat wrote:

> Couple of other questions and situation update:
> - there were not writes to the disk - this is good I think

Yes.

> - is the photorec able to search data in this partition table  
> corruption level?

Read  the tool's homepage. But I'm pretty sure it just looks at the  
bits on the drive and saves any collection of said bits which match  
specification for a jpeg, doc &c file. I.E. no remaining filesystem  
is needed, it does exactly what you need (although filenames aren't  
preserved. I don't know about the other suggestions, so they might be  
worth trying first.

> - I'm going to buy a new disk and to make dd of the corrupted one

Very wise!!

Do this FIRST! BEFORE you do anything else. Then you can always dd  
the drive back to its current state and try a different method if the  
first fails.

Stroller.
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Re: [gentoo-user] HELP! partition table is corrupted

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:

> >- is the photorec able to search data in this partition table  
> >corruption level?
> 
> Read  the tool's homepage. But I'm pretty sure it just looks at the  
> bits on the drive and saves any collection of said bits which match  
> specification for a jpeg, doc &c file. I.E. no remaining filesystem  
> is needed, it does exactly what you need (although filenames aren't  
> preserved. I don't know about the other suggestions, so they might be  
> worth trying first.

Yes, photorec is an completely different thing. It scans through
all blocks on disk and tries to find out what kind of files they
might belong to. 

This way you can reconstruct a lot of files if you lost the fs'
metadata (which can happen easily on FAT :(). But this is an
heuristic, not an stable approach. So you have to look through
all reconstructed files if they're really okay.

If just the partition table is broken, you shouldn't play with
this - use testdisk instead.


cu
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 Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce:
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 Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions:
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