Harddrive Partition Table errased?? (data recovery)

1veedo · 03-03-2008, 09:40 AM

This is strange for a while I didn't think my harddrive was working. Recently though I pluged the broken hd back in and noticed that the bios recognized 200-oddgb HD so I booted a liveCD and ran cat /dev/hda. My data is clearly there but there's no partition table or any way to actually read the harddrive.

Like I can cat for things I know are on the hd and it finds it.

Code:

cat /dev/hda | grep bookmarks.html
Binary file (standard input) matches
cat /dev/hda | grep "Civilization 4"
Binary file (standard input) matches

I can also look at it and I see grub close to the begining, reiserfs, and even entire text files like bash scrips I've written. I also saw a file that I'm pretty sure I deleated but I guess that makes sense because deleated files aren't actually explicitely removed.

I know there are plenty of other threads about recovering data but this seems like I could almost create a reiserfs and two ext2 partitions and everything would be there (the other two were actually ext3).

saikee · 03-03-2008, 09:51 AM

The kernel obviously detects the HDD so use the Live CD and post here the output of

Code:

fdisk -l

Lenard · 03-03-2008, 09:55 AM

Have attempted to use parted to possible recover the partition table???

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/m...ted.html#SEC24

1veedo · 03-03-2008, 10:06 AM

fdisk didn't have anything too useful is why I didn't post it.

Code:

[root@localhost live]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 203.9 GB, 203928109056 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24792 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk /dev/hda doesn't contain a valid partition table

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lenard

Have attempted to use parted to possible recover the partition table???

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/m...ted.html#SEC24

I don't know exactly where the partitions used to be.

Btw when trying print parted says "Error: Unable to open /dev/hda - unrecognised disk label."

1veedo · 03-03-2008, 10:47 AM

I ran testdisk and all my data appears to be back. The mbr doesn't work though and I tried installing grub with these error messages,

Code:

grub-install --root-directory=/media/disk-1/boot /dev/hda1
Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
Unknown partition table signature
Unknown partition table signature
Unknown partition table signature
Unknown partition table signature
Unknown partition table signature
Unknown partition table signature
The file /media/disk-1/boot/boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly.

Lenard · 03-03-2008, 11:23 AM

Well the first partition should start at sector zero, so try that as your starting point. Choose the ending point of your hard drive (24792) for the first partition. Choose the end of the first partition plus one for the next partition and so on.

David1357 · 03-03-2008, 12:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1veedo

Code:

grub-install --root-directory=/media/disk-1/boot /dev/hda1

You really want

Code:

grub-install --root-directory=/media/disk-1/boot /dev/hda

You want to GRUB on the disk, not on the first partition of the disk.

1veedo · 03-03-2008, 03:10 PM

Thanks. It still gave me the same errors but I tried a different liveCD and it worked just fine.

I cant believe it was so easy testdisk works really well.

jschiwal · 03-03-2008, 03:18 PM

Was this hard drive in the system when you installed linux? Is it the main drive with the system on it? When you install Linux, often an MBR backup is stored in /boot. If you backed up the /boot directory in the past, and this is the drive that the system booted from when you installed, you can use dd to restore the backup_mbr file to the first block of the drive.

If you saved a backup of the fdisk -l listing, you could use that info to recreate the partition table.

---

Sorry, I was slow typing and didn't see that you had the situation resolved. When you get it going again, be sure to run fdisk -l and print it out. This could help in the future.