Hi all,

I ran Damn Small Linux from a USB key to try to recover from a BSOD. When i rebooted i noticed that DSL was installed on my HDD. Ie it somehow reformatted my HDD, I'm pretty sure that i didnt wipe it intentionally.

How do i recover from this? I'm pretty sure the data is still on the drive.

Not knowing what steps you took after booting the USB, it's pretty hard to know what happened. I would not expect DSL or any other Linux distribution to automatically install without any proactive step from the user. Boot DSL and run as root user: fdisk -l (Lower case letter L in the command). This will give partition information so we have a starting point. If you know how to mount a partition, you could do that and take a look to see if you still have your files.

Duplicate threads cause confusion.

sudo fdisk -l shows

disk /dev/sda: 320GB, 320072932684 bytes
16 heads, 32 sectors/track, 1220981 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 512*512 = 262144 bytes

device boot start end blocks id system
/dev/sda1 * 1 976 249840 b win95 fat32

disk /dev/sdb: 255 MB, 25585244 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 31 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065*512= 8225280 bytes

device boot start end blocks id system
/dev/sdb1 * 1 31 248976 b win95 fat32
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-linux?):
phys=(0,0,1) logical=(0,1,1)

How do i make it boot from sda? Copy MBR record?

mount /dev/sda1 - mount the partition

ls /mnt/sda1 - list the mounted partition

ls /mnt/sdb1 - list the mounted partition

Still cant see my windows files.

Your fdisk output shows a 320GB drive with one windows partition with a fat32 filesystem. I expect the DSL is on the 255MB flash? Which version of windows are you using? Do you have its installation disk? Do you have a recovery option on it? You would need to use that to write the master boot record for windows.

You need to create a mount point and should specify a filesystem type, the command you list won't do anything. Create the directory windows in the /mnt directory when booted into DSL and run the command below. You should then be able to navigate to that directory and see if your files are there.

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows

Ok ran the command

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows

then ran

ls /mnt/windows

the file list is of the linux boot disk when it should be showing my windows file.

I am running Windows Vista, i dont have the installation disk. There was a recovery partition but it seemed to be wiped out. So it seems the partition is there, I just need to access it :-D

Anything else to try.

Please post your thread in only one forum. Posting a single thread in the most relevant forum will make it easier for members to help you and will keep the discussion in one place. This thread is being closed because it is a duplicate.


http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...my-hdd-942845/