HD install failed and now hda5 and hda7 have gone!Forum: HD Install Topic: HD install failed and now hda5 and hda7 have gone! started by: Woodlandjustin Posted by Woodlandjustin on July 03 2006,17:29
I wanted to save data from old OS to CD. So I tried first installing DSL to HD, by doing this; I tried the option from right clicking on the desktop "HD install". That apparently did nothing. Then I turned off the computer and turned on again and selected "save cd to hd and install" or something lke that. I saved it to HDA7 Then it was the same, the CD could not be ejected. So I turned it off and turned it on with no CD. But then I couldn't get any DSL at all. So I tried again, but turning it on with CD in, and then choosing the option "install from previously saved CD image on the HD" or something like that. And it did a few things and then came to something like "such and such is freaking out" or "such and such is panicking" or something. And then would go no further. Previously, the mount tool had acknowledged hda1, hda5 and hda7. Now however, it only acknowledges hda1. So, what has hapened to the other two? Are they destroyed? My purpose of using DSL at al was to just retrieve that data. Now it seems even more difficult. How can I find it? (N.B. I am not a computer person so please explain in a very easy way!.) Thank you very much! Justin Posted by mikshaw on July 03 2006,19:15
I have no idea what you just said. Technical answers can properly be given only to technical questions. What you have given is a lot of something-likes and such-and-suchs, which says very little about what you tried or what the outcome was.If you simply want to retrieve data from a harddrive, I can't say I'd recommend trying to install anything to that harddrive unless you are already pretty certain it will succeed. There is always a possibility of losing your data when you do an OS install, and if you're just guessing about how to do it the possibility becomes more of a probability. Now that I'm done preaching....DSL is first and formost a live CD. Try booting the live CD again, forget about installing and see if your data is still there. You should be able to accomplish whatever you need to do without bothering with an install....that can be done later, after your data is safe. Posted by Woodlandjustin on July 04 2006,02:42
I tried doing it from the live CD first, but I could not eject the CD! So, I could not find any way to burn the data onto a CD as the live cd didn't want to come out! So I came to the conclusion maybe I had to install the DSL onto the hard drive so it didn't need the live CD, so I could then burn the data. And, I'm sorry but I cannot be SURE what I am doing in ANY of these steps, as this is really not my thing (computers) and it is already taking me several weeks jus to get this far.I am sorry that I have not been precise in my explanation but I have been as precise as I possibly can, to the ability of my memory for all the unfamiliar terms I have encountered. I have indeed again installed from the live CD but the little mount tool window now only has the following; cdrom, hda1, fd0. Before it listed also hda5 and hda7. So does that mean that now hda5 and hda7 no long longer exist? I do not know what it means. Is there a way I might be able to still get int hda5 and hda7? Thank you Justin Posted by Woodlandjustin on July 04 2006,02:45
When I said "Then I turned off the computer and turned on again and selected "save cd to hd and install" or something lke that.", I meant that when the computer starts, when I turn it on, there is a screen and I can press F2 and F3 to get some menus. It is from there that it tells me what to type to choose something like "save cd to hd and install". That's what I meant there, if that makes things any clearer?Thanks! Justin Posted by Woodlandjustin on July 04 2006,03:04
Now further problem:I just rebooted and tried to boot the Windows 200 which is on this machine. That was on hda1, which DSL still recognised as being there. Usually when I turn the coomputer on (without the DSL cd in the drive) I get the suse menu of booting either suse or linux. Now I only get the DSL menu of linux or windows. However the linux doesn't boot (like I explained before - that is from when I tried (and apparently failed) to install DSL to the hard disk) and now I tried to boot windows. But now that doen't work! It says this: "Boot record signature AASS not found (0000 found). Wondows 2000 could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware." The thing is, apart from mounting and then dismounting hda1 in DSL, I did nothing to it. Out of hda1, hda5 and hda7, I only tried to install to hda7. But now hda5 AND hda7 seem to have dissappeared (at least DSL seems to not be able to see them) and now windows (on hda1) doesn't boot. Help much appreciated! Justin Posted by hugglebear on July 04 2006,08:39
Hi, it seems as though we have the same problem.I have only just discovered Linux and am beside myself with excitement at the possibility of taking my OS & Data around with me to use where I choose. Then I think "What If I can save the Live CD .iso onto the hard drive and fool the computer into thinking it's seeing a CD drive...." Well, you guys at dsl pretty much got that covered too! I charged ahead with a frugal install and answered all questions to proceed further and decided to install to hda2. I chose that as I had already partitioned the drive with XP and the 1 GB fat32 partition I had prepared for dsl seemed, I thought, to be physically located directly behind the C:winxp partition. I suppose what I thought is now irrelevant because ALL partitions after C: and the 1gig fat32 partition, have been wiped beautifully clean and is now seen by Partition Magic as Unallocated space! I think I overwrote my data (NTFS) with the ext.2 file system that Linux uses, and this is where our common ground lies as I believe you may have done the same. Or something similar! If my analysis is correct, then the solution lies in the question “Can data be recovered from a partition that has been overwritten with a different file system?" I think our data is lost, but I'll leave judgment to the experts....Gentlemen (and Ladies), it's time too see how clever and inventive you really are!!! Posted by JustoTech on July 04 2006,09:35
Ok, here's the true test. Start Windows and open the computer management section of Administrative Tools. Then go to "Disk Management" that will show you all partitions on the HD. If you don't see what you're looking for then it's probably gone forever. Once a partition is formatted it's nearly impossible to recover the data that was on it.
Posted by Woodlandjustin on July 04 2006,11:43
But like I said, Windows now cannot install! It says this;"Boot record signature AASS not found (0000 found). Wondows 2000 could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware." So That won't work. Justin Posted by Woodlandjustin on July 04 2006,11:45
I meant there, Windows cannot "start up" (words mixed up, sorry.Justin Posted by kerry on July 04 2006,21:41
justin can you post a copy of /boot/grub/menu.lst so we can see the settings for boot.
Posted by brianw on July 05 2006,00:49
First off, from what I understand, is that WinXP uses a filesystem that is not compatible with any other filesystem type. Secondly, if you install any OS to the hard drive (and DSL is no different) you will get a warning that all data will be lost on that partition (unless you are doing the frugal install but I don't know if you can do that with winXP).First thing I would do is throw in the LiveCD of DSL and then run fdisk and display the existing partition table to see what it says. Just because DSL does not mount the partition does not mean it is not there (using the liveCD you can look in /mnt to see what partitions are listed to see if DSL recognizes them). If you installed DSL to hda7 to get data from hda7 then you shouldn't have there is a warning when doing an HD install that data will be lost. Was the disk flakey to begin with? Is it a SATA hard drive (I have seen some warnings about this on other posts)? As far as Windows not starting it is probably caused by the boot manager not being configured correctly. From re-reading your posts I see that you did a reinstall and had DSL up and running. try looking in /mnt by opening elmfm and navigating to /mnt and see what is there. click on the aterminal icon and type mount at the prompt to see what you get. Look for hda7. Which partition did you have suse on and why wasn't suse booting so you could get the data off? Just as a side note you need to run with the toram code to be able to free your cd/cdburner for burning a disk when running from live cd otherwise the cd is a filesystem that will not be available to unmount. Posted by Woodlandjustin on July 05 2006,02:01
Hi brianw I will try to respond to each point in your post. I was running Windows 2000 not XP. I tried to install DSL to hda7. Windows appeared to be on hda1 (at least when I viewed the files from DSL). And hda 5 and hda7 (the only other hda things that appeared in DSL) both seemed to have the suse stuff on them. As the file I wanted to save was on hda5, I decided to install DSL to hda7. Was this the correct thinnking? Then, I am rather confused that now DSL cannot see hda5 (nor hda7). Plus Windows 200o (hda1) is also not booting. I cannot find anything named fdisk. Using Emelfm I can look in /mnt. Among anything with "hd" in the name, there is hd/ and hda1/. Like I said before also from the mount tool there is only hda1 whereas before there was hda5 and hda7 too. Was the disk flakey to begin with you asked? Not sure what that means, but, windows always booted up. It did however stop being able to shut down, without me holding down the power button. This started some time after another problem which prevented me getting into suse - I will explain below. I don't know if it is SATA. It is a Toshiba satallite is that helps. I had DSL up and running from the live CD. I can do live CD or "toram" without problems. At aterminal type mount, you said. It says this: /dev/roo on / type ext2 (rw) /dev/scd0 on /cdrom type iso9660 (ro) /dev/cloop on /KNOPPIX type iso9660 (ro) /ramdisk on /ramdisk type tmpfs (rw,size=199400k,size=197046k) /proc/bus/usb on /proc/bus/usb type usbdevfs (rw,devmode=0666) dsl@box:[ a kind of squiggle I cannot find on my keyboard]$ Suse according to DSL seemed to be on hda5 and hda7. It wasn't booting because I had to give my username and password, everytime. That in itself was fine, but then several times it would not shut down, or crashed, and so I had to hold down the power button to turn it off. On one of these occasions, when I next turned it on, when typing my username and password it was as if my password was wrong. So I could never get back in since then. That is why I came to be using DSL, to try to save that one folder i wanted before erasing that OS. Thank you Justin Posted by Woodlandjustin on July 05 2006,02:07
I tried typing that line into aterminal and it said "No such file or directory". I tried typing it into Emelfm and it said "not a directory". Perhaps I was meant to do something else with it? Justini Posted by brianw on July 05 2006,02:32
Justin, I guess I should have spedified for fdisk (I usually forget to specify this point) that you would need to use sudo infront (i.e. sudo fdisk) (or more specifically sudo fdisk -l) which will list the partition table. You were correct to install to hda7 if the file was on hda5 (usually hda1 is the main partition, hda2 is the extended partition and logical partitions start at hda5). I am assuming since suse was installed that there is an hda6 but it is used for swap. The fdisk command should confirm this. Installing DSL (or any OS for that matter) should not destroy the partitions. The only reason that should happen is if something over wrote the partition table (since windows is corrupted as well something may have happened). The only thing I can think of for that is if there was some sort of wierd setup for the allocations (or something was corrupted and damaged). Did you do the original setup or was this done by someone else? I can't remeber seeing anything unusual about the toshiba that would indicate a weird setup.The /boot/grub/menu.lst is a file you would view using a text editor but this would only apply after you installed and booted from the hard drive. With that system you probably are not dealing with a SATA hard drive. Let us know about the partition table so we can figure out where to go from here. Posted by Woodlandjustin on July 05 2006,04:57
So I do that, and it says: Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 5 will be corrected by w(rite) Disk /dev/hda: 20.0 GB, 20003880960 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2432 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 638 5124703+ b Win95 FAT32 /dev/hda2 639 2432 14410305 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA) dsl@box:[squiggle thing]$ Posted by kerry on July 05 2006,05:26
looks like you don't have no hda5 or hda7, also you would need a linux partion to install. did you grab that gparted live cd? it's alot easier to work with partions and resizing if you can see it visually like this-> < http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/2527/gparted3yv.png >also your extended partion is a fat, i'm not sure if you can make a linux partion on a extended fat. you can try to resize that and make a regular partion behind it. |