DSL saved my hard disc !!

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: DSL saved my hard disc !!
started by: jujusl

Posted by jujusl on Jan. 12 2006,13:10

Yesterday evening, I roughly switched off my computer (because of mouse trouble) running Ubuntu on my 2nd disk.
When I switched off, all my partition table for disk 2 had disappeared ! Everything was probably lost

I tried a Mandriva rescue CD, but fdisk wasn't able to find anything. Then I used the partition recovery tools gpart and testdisk => nothing found. No more hope...

I tried to read my backup DVD, but Mandriva rescue CD could not read UDF format. That problem saved me !!

I decided to use a livecd, and the first one I found at home was DSL ; after boot, I tried to find my DVD drive. Browsing in the /mnt directory, I saw several hdbx mount points ! Could it be possible ?? I tried to mount these partitions, and YES I could see all my "lost" files !

I then used fdisk to check, and saw all my partition being recognised. After have backed up all my important files, I ran fdisk again, and wrote the partition table to disk. As it was using the swap partition, I got a warning message.

After reboot, same problem with finding partitions ; using Mandriva rescue CD, I could again see the partition with fdisk ; I wrote once again the partition table.

At reboot, everything got OK

; I could find again my Ubuntu with all files.

Thousands of thanks to DSL team and this GREAT small tool !!

Stéphane

Posted by AwPhuch on Jan. 12 2006,22:56

Are you running ext3 on ubuntu to prevent loosing data and whatnot?

Im just trying to understand how it fixed it...

Awesome that you could save your data, but with ext3 isnt that automatic?

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by jujusl on Jan. 25 2006,10:38

Yes, I use mostly ext3 and reiserfs.

But the problem was not a corrupted filesystem, it was the complete loss of the partition table. So ext3 or any filesystem could not solve anything, as it makes use of an existing partition to manage files => no partition = no more filesystem.

I don't know how DSL managed to find partition table informations, even though no other tool (even partition recovery tools) was able to. I really could not believe it, but that's what happened (some kind of magic ??)

As soon as I rewrote the partition table to disk, everything got OK ; neither ext3 or reiserfs filesystems needed to be checked for errors, as no information had be damaged inside the partitions.

I have been using my PC for 2 weeks now since that problem happened, and it still runs perfectly, just like before...