wigimister Posted June 20, 2004 Report Share Posted June 20, 2004 This is my first time attempting to install linux on my HP Pavillion ze4430us, with AMDmobile 2400, 512ram. I finally got an external harddrive to make this possible.The hard drive is an external 80gb fat32 on usb1.1, i havenot bought the 2.0 card yet. The drive contained 17 gigs of media before i started instalation. I downloaded the three isos for Mandrake 10 community, verified the md5s, and instered the first cd. Windows loaded it, and it restarted to begin instalation. I let the installation partition 15gigs of my new hard drive, and everything was working fine untill the progress bar reached 10% or so full. the computer just turned itself off. Now back in xp, my new hard drive is recognized as raw, and it wants me to format it. I downloaded R-linux, some app, and it recognizes the hard drive as Ext2FS SuperBlock, but sais its partition tables are corrupted. Norton Disk Doctor said something about needing a lowlevel format. I am sure there is a way to return my hard drive to its previous Fat32 way, with the data on there, because i know for sure it did not format that section of the hard drive. i unchecked the box, and i would have noticed the time it would have taken. This r-Linux utility is scanning the drive right now, to see if it can recover anything, but it appears to be going so slow that it would take several days to finish, and i have intuition that xp wont be able to handle it for that long. i think the program is working, not locked up, cause my harddrive continues to blink. please help me!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted June 20, 2004 Report Share Posted June 20, 2004 Get a portable distro like MEPIS. Boot with it and use the utility to see what is on the drive. I fear the worst! :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wigimister Posted June 21, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 21, 2004 well, the files i need are were stored on the fat32 partition, not the Ext2FS Superblock, is it still possible to recover them through linux? That r-linux utility has been scanning my harddrive for over 24hours now, but is about 85% done, so maby tomorow i will be lucky. Has anyone had any success with any partition recovery software (preferabely for windows) hopefully soon this will all be done(loss or win) so that i can get back to installing mandrake. Thanks for your future replys... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted June 21, 2004 Report Share Posted June 21, 2004 If there are problems with a specific partition, yes recovery is good. If the entire partition table is hosed, then everything is hosed with it. The table tells the story of the drive. Actually, to erase a drive, all you need to change is the partition table. The contents will be overwritten because the table says what is what. Recovery software attemptes to reconstruct a table and thus "see" the files before they have been overwritten. For security, if you ever want to destroy data, you must format, then repartition, then format again. The data is destroyed by this process. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted June 21, 2004 Report Share Posted June 21, 2004 If the entire partition table is hosed, then everything is hosed with it. The table tells the story of the drive. exactly what I'm dealing with .....PM8/Win98/ntldr/and especially the end users fault in my case. I can boot to win98se and 2 mandrakes.......but xp is a no_show.....won't boot...can't find that dumb hal whatever crap......everytime this has happened hda has to be re-done completely from a hard format......round and round we go Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted June 21, 2004 Report Share Posted June 21, 2004 So much fun....so little time! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roland Posted June 21, 2004 Report Share Posted June 21, 2004 Isn't it the LBA thing ? (with 10.0CE, if the hd is configured as AUTO instead of LBA on the BIOS, there can be fixable problems. Even with FAT32 I thing. Well I've heard of the problem but I don't remember the fix. somebody else ? ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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