Tell me all his data is not lost!
 

I need help. I installed RedHat 9 to a brand new hard drive on my friends computer. It was fresh, right out of the box. It is connected to the same ribbon cable as another 40GB hdd, his Windows drive, with all his data. The Windows hdd is master; the Linux hdd is slave.

We changed cmos to boot to hdd1 (Linux) rather than hdd0 (Windows) and started with the CD in the drive. When it came to partitioning, I didn't select Disk Druid, but just hit enter. I got in a hurry, and didn't disconnect the ribbon cable from the Windows hdd.

Now, he says he can only boot to Linux, even after changing the boot order in cmos to hdd0. The following is from his hardware browser, which I though would be the easiest way to see it.

DEVICE START END Mb Type

/dev/hda

hda1 1 13 102Mb ext3

hda2 14 5005 39158Mb ext3


/dev/hdb

hdb1 1 32 251 Linux-swap

33 4865 37911 Free space


Any help would be appreciated. If I have hosed his hdd, I hosed it. If it can be recovered, we will.

TIA

yep i'd say that was well and truly gone forever.... both drives have clearly been repartitioned... sorry to break it to you..

Thanks Chris.

I was hoping you'd be one to post.

When doing the install over, do you suggest installing each OS with only that hdd connected to the mobo and changing the boot order in cmos to reboot? Or installing Windoze first and then Linux and install the boot loader to hda and let Linux be the default OS and have Windows listed on the drive?

How and what do you suggest, please.

personaly i find it easiest to have windows on the comp already and let redhat's install program put a boot loader on the first hd. just make sure to look at the partition table before writing it to the disk. if you wipe the table off the linux drive, redhat has an option to just install in "free space". that's worked for me too.

You should always check and double check when fooling with partitions and formatting. Not doing so will cause loss of data.
I just formated over the wrong partitiion a short time ago. I deleted then readded a partition. Unfortunately that changed the partition number of all the partitions after it. Of course I formated the wrong drive. That is what a "quick check" will get you.

Yes, you are right.

Fortunately, the guy is not mad at me. He said,

"Yes, I just read Acid Kewpie's reply. I guess that's it then. Have a rest, bro, the world will still turn without my data - anyway I think I have most of it. One particular XL file I can mostly reconstruct out of my head. I didn't back it up. I was going to do it so many times but kept forgetting. Some of the photos are on a CD but there's some important stuff on there. Is there a recovery program we can use?

Don't feel bad. A lot of the stuff is old and this might just encourage me to start again and not have so much junk on my HD. It really is not important. Even if I lost every schred of data - does it matter? No.

Anyway I have already started rebuilding from diskettes and I have all my addresses and email addresses on PDA (knew it would be good for something!)"



Now, that's a real friend.

I have repaired and built Windows based computers for years. In 1999 I ran a dual boot with RedHat, but got discouraged and quit. Now I've just installed RedHat 9 on a new hdd in my computer, and I am committed to learning. This time, I won't give up. I have already formatted and reinstalled 3 times. Once because there were too many procs running and the sys was slow. Someone gave me instructions for writing a shell script to remove a bunch of them, but somehow I messed it up (copying and pasting) and hosed my system because I had to reboot to get to Windoze (I had 150 CD's to burn in just a few hours). Then when I reinstalled I chose Everything again. Still slow, and I couldn't get KDE to stay - even after rewriting the config file, it still booted to Gnome. So I reinstalled and chose the packages.

I am learning, and this was a hard lesson. I installed mine with the ribbon cable only on the Linux drive, and off the Windoze drive. It was my intention to do his the same way. When I put his 2nd hdd in the box, I didn't plan to install at that time. The ribbon cable was on both drives. If I had read what was happening at the time of partitioning I would have seen it, but I was talking.

Tomorrow morning I will rebuild both his hdd's. Thanks for the advice on installation. He will rather have a dual boot screen than going into cmos and changing the boot order, as I do.

You really say that in China?
:D

Yes, one must get philosophical about major data loss..

He's an Aussie!

LOL

I once trashed a coworkers entire data set by installing linux over his windows partition. I thought he had backed up the data and he thought I was going to back up the data.
If you haven't actually done a mkfs on the disks, you can still recover the data without too much trouble, IF you remember the partition scheme used for the drive. . .

I haven't done a mkfs - don't even know what that is. Please tell me more. I know Windoze really well, but I'm totally new to Linux. I do know that unless it does a proper low level format (which I don't think it could have done so quickly) and not just rewritten some data from the front and back end of the hdd, in Windoze I could recover some of it (if not all of it).

The partition scheme used for the original Windoze drive, or the partition scheme used by Linux? The Linux scheme is easy enough to see - and all you experts would know just what it did, because we didn't use the Disk Druid, but just let her rip (see Post #1). Remember that both hdd's are 40GB.

Any help you can give would be appreciated. He's bringing the box over today for me to rebuild both hdd's, and if I could recover some data it would be nice.

TIA - and tkx for your post!

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb1 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0


In addition to the information in Post #1, this may help.

You can try this if you like.
There is a free demo that lets you see if you may be able to recover data, by identifying partitions. The fast option tells you what it can in a few minutes. The complete option took about 24 hours and could not help me.
If the demo shows it can recover your partition, you can consider getting the full version.
Mine was gone since I had done a format.

Thanks 2damncommon,

May have a look at it.

You would need to know the windows partition scheme.
Post the output of:
or for whatever hard drive the windows stuff is supposed to be on. /dev/hda is the master drive on the primary controller, hdb is slave on primary, etc.