Notes on Partition Recovery.

[Counterspy]

For insurance, if you ever need Parted for partiton recovery, make sure you create the required boot disks in advance. The images are here: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/bootdisk/ . You can get them from the site and use the rawrite program in Windows from your first install disk should you forget to do this or follow the instructions on the site for Linux.

 

Testdisk still has a Windows executable, but has added code for operating in Linux and requires additional files. Get them here along with the docs: http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html .

 

Other Linux partitioners include Gpart here: http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/ , sfdisk and cfdisk as well as Linux fdisk. See the man pages for them.

 

Ext3 and Reiserfs are supported by some but not all. Check in advance for these and other journalling systems.

 

Ranish Partition Manager works in Windows and is free from here: http://www.ranish.com. It has a prominent warning about using Windows software on Linux partitions. I would be satisfied with its use depending on the extent of damage.

 

Acronis, Paragon or Partition Magic should never be allowed to write to a disk with Linux installed. They calculate the partition sizes differently and report errors that be inaccurate and will hose you system. The only exception I would make is the experienced user who has used any of these in a variety of recovery scenarios.

 

Keep in mind that Linux partitoners should be used with Linux and Windows partitioners with Windows.

 

Any of the three above can be used for initial partitioning or LOOKING at damaged partitions.

 

There are three How-to's that should be mandatory reading before partitions are messed up: Linux Hard Disk How To, Partitioning mini How-To, and the Partition Recovery mini-how to. Get them here: http://www.tldp.org .

 

Counterspy