Killed Hard Drive

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Killed Hard Drive
started by: spyro

Posted by spyro on Dec. 04 2006,03:57

I have tinkered with DSL for quite some time now and really like it. Unfortunately I created some problems for myself and am hoping that someone can offer a suggestion.

I booted from a live CD and attempted to install to a pen drive. I forgot that I had an external USB hard drive attached to the machine and mistakenly used the wrong drive designation for the install. DSL kicked back an error saying that it could not mount the drive and I immediately realized my mistake. I was able to see that the data was still on the drive until I rebooted to Windows.

The primary OS on that machine is XP and it now thinks the drive is unformatted. I am unable to mount the drive via Linux either. I'm pretty sure that DSL probably splattered the MBR on the drive. Any ideas on how I can repair that and recover the data would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks.

Posted by skaos on Dec. 06 2006,12:47

I'm no expert, the following is just some ideas. If the mbr was overwritten, you could try to use cfdisk (or fdisk) in DSL to recreate the mbr, i.e. to create one big partition (fat32 or ntfs) using the whole disk (assuming this was the case before the problem). It may or may not work. Then again, I'm no expert ....

Posted by andrewb on Dec. 06 2006,22:40

Try testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/). I've used the linux verision very sucessfully to recover partitions from a drive. An excellent program to have on hand when messing around with partitions.

Posted by spyro on Dec. 18 2006,01:41

WICKED! TestDisk worked perfectly and I was able to save every byte of data. The interface is a little confusing at first, but I highly recommend this piece of software, especially if you are foolish enough to wreck your MBR like I did when trying to do a pendrive installation.

Thanks for the recommendation, ANDREWB.