Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel

sycamorex · 09-13-2007, 04:28 PM

Hi,

I have got a SATA hard drive with a few distros and an IDE 320GB hard drive
with music, etc.

I was tampering with it too much and now the IDE drive with data is gone

Code:

linux-tree:/home/sycamorex# fdisk /dev/hda
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
content won't be recoverable.

You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

Is there any chance I can restore the partition table and get the access to
my data?
thanks

unSpawn · 09-13-2007, 05:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sycamorex

I was tampering with it too much

How *exactly* did you do abuse the HD?

Quote:

Originally Posted by sycamorex

Is there any chance I can restore the partition table and get the access to my data?

I'd make a 'dd' backup copy of the IDE disk on another medium, disconnect it and stash it somewhere safe. Then run gpart/testdisk.

sycamorex · 09-13-2007, 05:43 PM

thanks for your reply

I plugged in the third disk, which wasn't recognised, so I started playing with the jumpers and cables. After not being able to see all three disks, I returned to the original arrangement of HDs. However, although the settings (jumpers,cables) are the same I couldn't read the IDE data drive.

well I can't backup the drive, it has over 250GB of data. I downloaded gpart which was supposed to guess the hd partition
table, however it wasn't able to do it because the disk 'is too large'

Scroggs79 · 09-14-2007, 01:54 AM

I would boot from a bootable linux CD like knoppix or something.
Then try to mount your partitions. If you can mount them then you can back up
your important data. After getting your data you can run lilo to put back the master boot record.

I did this before and I think I had to do a chroot in order for lilo to work properly.

Don't repartition the drive.

Worse case you can recover important files by file type using a freely available program called photorec.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
I used it on a friends disk after he formatted the drive. It recovered all of his pictures
and documents

sycamorex · 09-15-2007, 02:49 PM

thanks, unfortunately, a live cd didn't help, I couldn't mount the drive.
However, I managed to recover some of the files with photorec (good piece of software)
Then I reformatted the drive