harddisk partotion table is gone consider building new one with fdisk

/y0shi · 04-29-2006, 08:58 AM

I'm new in this forum, hope that fits in hear ...

The Problem is a harddisk with 300GB from a friend this harddisk is extern it will connect via USB, there was just one partition on it, formatted with vfat. He somehow deleted this partitiontable with a windowsinstaller or something like that. But this disk is NOT formatted now. I tried to access this harddrive with a Knoppix live CD and it says something like no good partitiontable - that doesnt surprised me ...

here is what I did

try to see with:
# fdisk -l /deb/ubb
=> he found it with ubb1
so try to mount with:
# mount -t vfat /dev/ubb1 /mnt/ubb1
=> doesnt work (no good partitiontable ...)
and yes if I look at it with:
# fdisk /dev/ubb1
# p
=> he does show me some blocks but not something like /dev/ubb1 so there is really no partitiontable ...

So here comes my question:

Can I make a new partition with fdisk on that harddrive (and write it to that harddrive) and do not format it afterwards and mount it than again and save the data on that drive?

(hope its clear what I mean, I'm not that good in english)

thx in advance
y0shi

ataraxia · 04-30-2006, 01:51 AM

If you can make the same partition table as before, and nothing else is wrong that you didn't find, yet, this should work.

There's no reason not to try it - you won't make the data any more lost than it is now

You could also try using "foremost" on the raw disk device to find some files.

syg00 · 04-30-2006, 02:45 AM

fdisk will work if you know the previous state (start and size) of the now defunct partition. Note that fdisk expects device not partition for this to work.

I would have expected Knoppix to see it as /dev/sd? (a or b probably depending on what else you have).
All else fails, have a look at testdisk - it's on Knoppix. Start up a terminal, then "su" (no password) then "testdisk /dev/???". It'll analyze the device, and look for partition "signatures" in the data, and present them as an option for you to re-create.

/y0shi · 04-30-2006, 01:22 PM

thx for your help so far I think I should try that with this new partitiontable, cause there was just on partition on it ...

On my thinkpad my normal harddrive is /dev/hda and my first usbdevice /dev/sda (on slackware) but with this knoppix live cd the first usbdevice is /dev/uba and the second /dev/ubb ...

... this testdisk stuff sounds interesting too we will see, problem is that I have to visit this friend to test your advices, so give me some time ...