Windows scandisk caused loss of shared partition with linux on dual boot machine
 

I am running mandrake 10.1 with great satisfaction, apart from the fact that my scanner is not supported, so I am forced to maintain dual boot.

I had the partition in which I kept my data shared with the windows system (win98).

On a reboot, win 98 scandisk corrected what He thougth was a mistake and as a result I lost evrything there was on the shared partition.!!!

I browsed these forums and found some help in the utility "testdisk". I managed to make a dump of my lost data with photorec, but it implies a lot of time in reordering the result, so I tried testdisk itself, but it seems to be quite difficult to use by an inexperienced usr like me.

I read the material in the testdisk site, with also the recovery examples, but I am not confident of what I am doing all the same.

Can anybody suggest some link where I could find a Really beginner guide to use this software?

Or is there somebody that can guide me step by step?

If I type df I get
Filesystem Dimens. Usati Disp. Uso% Montato su
/dev/hdb8 5,8G 2,3G 3,2G 43% /
/dev/hdb6 23G 7,0G 15G 33% /home
/dev/hda1 3,9G 2,2G 1,8G 55% /mnt/win_c
/dev/hdb5 47G 4,8G 42G 11% /mnt/win_c2
/dev/hda5 502M 120K 502M 1% /mnt/win_d

Now the first strange thing. /dev/hdb5 is the partition where I had my data and now it is empty, BUT df says it is used for 11%. Second strange thing. I have also a partition /dev/hda6 that is mounted as /mnt/win_e and that is NOT seen by df.

The content of my /etc/fstab is
/dev/hdb8 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy vfat user 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hdb5 /mnt/win_c2 vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0
/dev/hda6 /mnt/win_e vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0

The output of test disk for disk hdb is

Disk /dev/hdb - 81 GB / 76 GiB - CHS 158816 16 63
Current partition structure:
Partition Start End Size in sectors
1 E extended LBA 15 15 1 158785 4 63 160039530

Warning: Bad ending head (CHS and LBA don't match)
No partition is bootable
Warning: Incorrect number of heads/cylinder 255 (FAT) != 16 (HD)
5 L FAT32 16 0 1 96931 13 63 97691202 [DATI]

Warning: Bad ending head (CHS and LBA don't match)
X extended 96931 14 1 145700 9 63 49158900

Warning: Bad ending head (CHS and LBA don't match)
6 L Linux 96931 15 1 145700 9 63 49158837


Now: partition 5 [DATI] is the lost one. PArtition 6 is the one on which I have /home. Testdisk does not see partitions 7 and 8 which are actually used by my working linux system (root and swap).


I must add the last datum: the installation was done using maxtor tool "maxblast" in order to let my old BIOS see the correct dimension of the hard disk.

Thank you and sorry for bothering you. If I don't find any answer, I think I will reconstruct with infinite patience my data from photorec dump, and then format everything.

Hi there, I don't know how useful this will or won't actually be, but you can find a testdisk how to at http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/testdisk.html

Hopefully you can get it sorted.

John

My advice would to find a really good recovery program. Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional is good. It has a format recovery option as well.

Regards,

Brandon

More advice when faced with "lost data":

1. Stop and think about the value of the data vs the value of your time. Especially if you are unfamiliar with disk and file structure, it may be much better in the long run to engage a professional recovery service.
2. Do not use the disk--especially to write (save) until you work out a plan.
3. If you are attempting recovery yourself, consider cloning the disk first.
4. While you are deciding how to proceed, start designing a backup strategy.

Well said Pixel, I forgot that I was once this way.

Well, actually my data are not actually important (meaning that no money are involved), but they are really personal, some letter that I wrote and so on. If everything fails, I have the dump made by photorec... I tried to follow the howto indicated by johngreenwood, but I got the message that testdisk was not able to find any readable file table. I think the whole filesystem is in jeopardize... Now I try with Ontrack Easy Recovery.

Hey,

One bit of advice before using Ontrack, make sure that you have a second drive to save it to. You can NOT save to another partition on the same disk. The program automatically assumes that the entire drive is failing and will not move the data around on the drive. You need to move it to a known working drive, whether it be internal or external.

Regards,

Brandon

testdisk is not really designed for this job - it is more for recovering partitions that have been deleted, rather than recovering corrupted data within partitions.
If photorec recognises your data, well and good - I have found occasions when it doesn't. As stated, data recovery is a time consuming task - I keep some USB external drives to dump the recovered files onto, and go through the files at my leisure.