To FUBAR and back again!
by subacati
How to recover your lost partition table!
If you use gparted from time to time you will, sooner or later, accidently erase the partition table on your primary hard drive! :left:.
…
A simple task.
It all started when a colleague asked me to copy a movie on to a usb flash drive for him. He wanted to see if his new blu-ray player would play dvd's from the usb socket. :left:. I didn't have any blank flash drives, so I decided to format one that I didn't need any more. Unfortunately, I forgot to concentrate and erased the partition table on /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdb :doh:.
The result was an unbootable netbook and the possible loss of all my data! :insane:.
Well, I knew that all the data was still there, I just couldn't access it! :awww:. Since I didn't have any current backups, I'd only just got my backup drive back from a colleague I'd lent it to, I had to try the hard way to recover from this FUBAR!
The first task was to backup the drive so that if I made things worse, I could at least return to the condition I started with. :knight:. I booted with System Rescue CD and mounted the backup drive like this;
mkdir /mnt/backup mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/backup
Then I used dd to make a drive image of the hard drive. (make sure you have enough free space in your destination drive);
dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/backup/drive.img
That took several hours on my 500GB hard drive! :faint:. Be patient because dd does not give any progress report until it's finished! :up:.
The next step is easier and quicker. I simply typed, 'testdisk' on the command line. I followed the menus and recovered the partition table as far as possible. Unfortunately, This process wipes out grub. :awww:.
Now I know there is a way to chroot into the directory, but I couldn't get that to work so my next step was to boot up with my Ubuntu install disk. I selected install and then proceeded with installing 'side by side' with existing systems. This process installs grub, thus making my machine bootable again! :hat:.
So now my system is restored with no data lost! :yes:.
subacati 
:hat:
Very clever! Welldone Aadil!:p 😉 :up: :yes: :wizard: :pingu: :cow:
*Kimmie's brain fizzles and pops with computer-esque jargon* Duhhh… Glad it's all better :left:
Glad to hear you lost no data and you got it restored. 😀
Originally posted by gdare:
I suppose I could have tried something like that but I wanted to keep my existing installed and customised version of Ubuntu. I cleaned it up by deleting the extra, unwanted installation, then un-installed grub-pc and then re-installing grub-pc. :up:.And yes, I know it's not the most efficient way to work but it's lighter on the brains and, most important, it works! :hat:.
Couldn`t you boot your computer with Hiren`s boot CD (or something similar) and then use some of data recovery softwares? You could save them to another partition and then make a clean install of OS :left:
Yeah. Why blow everything up when a few strategic tables can fix everything!
When you blow 'hda' and have no copies on 'hdb' you need to walk to Canossa… That is what Aadil made and he 'enjoyed' the scenery!:rolleyes: 😮 😆 😥 :irked: :yikes: :devil: :sing: :yes: :doh:
:yes::hat:.And I've just collected my 1G ram at the postoffice and installed it. Now I have 1.5G ram which is the maximum that this netbook can have. :yes::hat:.:sst:. Acer, in their infinite wisdom, put 512M directly on the motherboard thus limiting the ram upgrade to 1.5G. :rolleyes:.
That is more than enough, Aadil! My wife does it with 1 Mb…:coffee: :hat:
Originally posted by qlue:
So you are forced to buy a new one as soon as you need more power 😛
actually, they don't intend for you to upgrade the ram at all. :p. They state clearly in their documentation that the ram is not user upgradeable. :whistle:. And opening the netbook up to upgrade the ram voids the warranty. :rolleyes:.(actually, the warranty ran out ages ago but was voided less than twenty four hours after I got it home. :whistle:)
😆
But 1.5 G is enough when using Linux. Ever tried "cross border" partitioning Linux File System? I have 3 part. for it now, f.ex. Var on another disk incl. my BU.
Originally posted by nepmak2000:
I had something like that when I was still using the ssd. I had 8G on the ssd and a 16G sd card. the sd card had two 8G partitions, one for /home and one for /usr with everything else on the ssd. :up:.Now that I have a proper 500G hdd, there doesn't seem to be much point in using a 16G sd card for anything! :p.
True, but I have HOME and VAR at their own partitions, using VAR at the same time as my backup repo. Oh, I forgot: VAR I do for KDE reasons. I have KDE, Gnome and Unity desktops in the same FS.Having HOME separated has the well-known advantage, that you can update the OS without touching your data.:up:
KDE doesn't work well on my netbook. It's also not very modem friendly. :left:. I suspect it needs a more powerfull machine and possibly a more robust GPU to work properly. :up:.
Reasons why I am not so fond of it as well…:zip: :doh: :spock: