Hi, yesterday I used G4L to create image of Linux on my drive and it hung in between, so I rebooted and lost my data.

Specs: P4 80 GB IDE internal HDD. Multiboot with Linux,Windows and BSD installed on it. An external 500 GB IDE HDD, Maxtor.

What I did - I wanted to clone my Arch partition to keep it as a backup if something went wrong in future, so I downloaded G4L and booted with the G4l live cd. Then after it initialized, i went for g4l option to continue cloning, after that Selected RAW filesystem and then selected click'n'clone. Selected my target to clone - /dev/hda: which showed the proper capacity of 80 GB. Then selected destination target - /dev/sda(thats how my external HDD appears in many distros):which showed the size as 0!!.

It startded cloning, but after 15 mins or so it wont move more than 0% in activity so I cancelled the process and rebooted the system to my Arch and now Arch wont mount the HDD anymore! so i connected it to windows and It gets detected but shows as raw!

Problem - The Win detects drive and asks to format it and shows the total capacity of drive as 13.4 GB!..I did a quick format and now Arch(hal) mounts my HDD but it shows the same 13.4 GB capacity. H E L P!!

Well while G4L was booting among many messages it showed a message as /dev/sda too big... Secondly I used G4L as N0rt0n Gh0st so I thought that it will create a image file and save it to my external HDD. DuH.

Thanks in advance.

What you did was tell G4L to clone the internal drive to the external, wiping everything off of the external, not make an image file of the internal drive.

It sounds like the problem you are having now is that G4L copied the partition table from the internal to external, which means it will show partitions that are much smaller than the physical drive. You should be able to use "fdisk" under Arch to create a new partition table (to start with just try and make the whole drive one partition) and write it to disk.

Now if you are trying to recover the data that used to be on the external, that is another problem entirely.

Aha..yep did fdisk /dev/sdb and it prints the same partition table as internal drive. Is there any way to restore the old table or any suggestion for data recovery? Also the strange thing is from my internal HDD grub wont boot windows(sda1) rest all boots..and am unable to mount it under linux as well, gives me the same error as extrnl drive - not a valid NTFS partition...y wud that happen, any idea? Thanks a zillion

....................................Finally I had to connect the HDD in WinXp..it showd 13 GB + rest of the space as other partitions. Deleted all partitions and now its working as normal. I should have used testdisk application before formatting the 13.4 GB of NTFS space. But anyways data's gone