[LinuxUsers] Partition Deleted

[Chris Penn]

I GOT IT!!

So testdisk is the bomb.  photorec is part of testdisk and I used that
to recover the data the hard way.  I then used testdisk and saw that
the disk was NTFS and that the partition was still there.  The issue
appears to have been that the windows installer attempted to install a
boot sector and failed.  I repaired this boot sector and the drive was
mountable and intact.

Since it was a M$ boot sector on the drive, I used two programs to
look at and fix the issue.

first is ms-sys.
http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net/
One can repair a M$ mbr with
:~$ sudo ms-sys -m /dev/sda

Second:
Roger recommended super-fdisk.  The same company makes something
called PPTD partition table doctor 3.5.  I was able to see the same
things I saw with testdisk.  I was also able to verify that the file
structure that was there before repairing the boot sector.  There is
also an option to fix a boot sector in this program.


Contrary to the comment on what I will and will not admit, my first
reaction was to call Roger because he has been spending a lot of time
the last few months fixing and recovery broken M$ drives.  I will
leave out jabs that come to mind with the poking at Linux, I am just
to damn happy I recovered that data.

Thanks roger for taking my late call of distress.  Thanks Vandyke and
Dino for the recommendations.

Chris...


On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Roger E. Rustad, Jr
<roger.rustad at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dino K wrote:
>> should be pretty simple if it's just the partition itself is messed up.
>>
>> You can do an fdisk -l and see if it sees what the partitions or sizes
>> are.
>>
>> If it can, you can just relabel the partition in fdisk interactive mode
>> as FAT32 or whatever.
>
> Yeah, I gave him a disk that has UBCD (which includes Super FDisk) on
> it, so that's an option also.
>
> In these cases, I usually just quickly pull the data with a known good
> tool before trying the fdisk option.
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