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Please help me climb out of a deep hole [solved]


viking777
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I am not absolutely sure how it happened, I was just installing a backup image of a partition that I had messed up when all hell broke loose! After the reinstallation all I got was grub errors. I used all the tools that I had to recover from these and I have been successful. I have 4 OS's on my current disk and all of them boot normally. Trouble is though that all my disk management tools, command line or gui just report errors in the partition table (or just don't work at all).

 

For example fdisk just says " Unable to seek on /dev/sda", gparted just reports that the entire disk is 'unallocated', diskdrake just says 'partition table is too corrupted for me to read' (although it does go on to show the disk contents but warns that I will not be able to make any changes to any of the partitions). The only tool that does not report any errors is the windows tool Acronis disk director.

 

The problem is though that Acronis and the Linux tools both report different disk arrangements. Eg. Acronis says my Mandriva 2008.1 partition is /dev/sda5, whereas diskdrake says it is /dev/sda9. The only partitions that haven't changed number are the two windows partitions and the Cooker partition (although according to diskdrake it has mysteriously moved itself from the middle of the disk to the end!). I am amazed I got it to boot at all given the mess it appears to be in.

 

I have tried SysRescue cd, parted magic cd, super grub disk, knoppix, Acronis, testdisk and both a Mandriva and a Suse install disk to try and remedy this situation but I haven't succeeded.

 

Obviously the partition table is corrupted, but how can I fix that without deleting everything and starting over? I don't really want to do anything destructive particularly as everything boots, but not being able to use a single disk management tool is a limitation that I couldn't live with for long.

 

Oh, the good news is that the partition I restored is working perfectly btw, it just is no longer in the place where it used to be.

Edited by viking777
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If it was me, I would try to backup everything with a good backup program onto DVD's or a spare hard drive. If possible test the backups on another hard drive. This might be a good time to buy a second hard drive and restore your backups onto it. I have a feeling that imaging backup software would not be the best choice in this case. Here is one possible solution: http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_backuppc Here is another one: http://www.backupcentral.com/components/co..._Metal_Recovery You can search online for what is available.

 

Once you have your backups made, the best thing to do IMO would be to use a hard disk diagnostic utility from the hard drive manufacturer and see what it reports. The manufacturers also make low level formatting utilities that will remove all partition information. After using one of these low level formatting utilities, you can then repartition and reformat you hard drive, and restore your backups if you wish.

 

Since your partition table got corrupted, it is possible that your hard drive is beginning to fail anyway. So you should try to backup what you have before continueing with repair attempts.

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Thanks for that reply David, but I certainly don't want to go down that road just yet. The hard drive, and the computer itself, is only 3 weeks old, it really would be unfortunate if the hard drive were failing already, this is definitely something that I have done to it by using windows tools to restore Linux partitions. It has always worked before, but recently it has become a real problem.

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This problem is now solved - I suppose I should tell you how I did it - except I don't really know any more than I know how I got into the mess in the first place.

 

I guess the key was to use the 'testdisk' program again, although it is extremely nerve wracking as it has very little information with it and I am not at all sure what it is doing. Anyway I used it to create a new partition layout (which was roughly the way it was before this all started except that my Mandriva partition - the one that I restored - was gone). I wrote this to the mbr.

 

Unsurprisingly after that nothing booted so I then used Puppy linux to manually edit all the entries in menu.lst. This resulted in two of the 4 operating systems booting again. I then used Acronis to reinstall the missing Mandriva partition (strangely enough Acronis could see where the missing partition fitted and just popped it straight back in there). Unfortunately in doing so it renumbered all the partitions again so I was back into Puppy to once again manually alter the menu.lst entries.

 

Again nothing booted so it was into Super Grub disc to try to reinstall grub. Both the automatic and the manual methods it offered to do this failed so in the end I just got into a grub prompt and did it by hand and this worked first time.

 

This then left me with Vista unbootable, but this was cured by running the Vista recovery disc on automatic repair twice!

 

The only thing left unworkable then was my swap file for some reason, so back into system recovery to run mkswap and this was fixed as well.

 

Everything is now working 100% and I have full access with all my disk management tools once again.

 

I think I will switch the computer off now before I do any more damage.

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Glad you got it sorted. :)

 

Yeah, a hard drive should not fail in just three weeks. I didn't realize your system was so new. I have lost several hard drives over the years, so I don't trust them all that much. I even carry a spare hard drive with me when I am out of town, with a complete working OS installed on it in case my primary hard drive fails.

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