Partition and data Recovery

[Lazaro]

During the installation of LinuxMint 8 I removed all partitions and Installed it on all the drivespace available. However I had forgotten that my external hard drive was still in the back and thats where most of LinuxMint now is.

Now It wont boot up without the drive attached, and I don't want to try removing partitions to get my external drive back without knowing exactly what I'm doing.

If anyone can give me instructions as to how to recover my extremely precious data and the old partitions so I can reinstall just on the computer's hard disk I would be extremely grateful as I was really enjoying my 'successful' installation until I realised I had no music...

82GB Filesystem {the computer's drive
type: HPFS/NTFS (0x07)

250GB Hard Disk {my portable drive
>247GB Filesystem
>3.1GB Extended
>3.1GB Swap Space

Thats how its organised at the mo

Thanks!

[oz]

If anyone can give me instructions as to how to recover my extremely precious data and the old partitions so I can reinstall just on the computer's hard disk I would be extremely grateful as I was really enjoying my 'successful' installation until I realised I had no music...

Welcome to the forums!

The best tools that I know of for partition and data recovery are testdisk and photorec:

TestDisk - CGSecurity

You can find both apps on the easy to use Parted Magic LiveCD:

Parted Magic News

[Lazaro]

I've tried downloading partition magic several times now but I can't seem to get it to work.
I'm unzipping it with archive manager, ripping the image with brasero, but the cd just appears as files and data.
The only thing I can see wrong is that I keep getting the wrong md5sum:

3b07a5d895bd44be9ebc4f28b6afdc80

which doesn't match the one they have on the website. Am I doing something wrong?

___________________
Lazaro

[coopstah13]

do you mean burn the image with brasero? m5dsum mismatch means the download was corrupted, or they posted the wrong md5sum, or you are looking at the wrong md5sum

[Lazaro]

oops, yes I meant burn. I've tried downloading it as a torrent which apparently should be more reliable, I thought it might be archive manager not unzipping it properly or something.

I'm looking at the md5sum the website has next to the download link, so that can't be wrong.

I also tried downloading it on another computer and I get the same md5sum. Ill try burning another disk with infra recorder but somehow I have a feeling it won't work

[coopstah13]

possibly you have a bad NIC or router, I just downloaded the file and the md5sum matched

md5sum ~/download/pmagic-4.6.iso.zip 
cc7da270feff76abc5e2faec44cc69ca  /home/ccooper/download/pmagic-4.6.iso.zip

[Lazaro]

I have no idea why it isn't working for me, I even tried it from my uni network!

Never mind, thanks for all the help guys, I ended up handing it over to someone who has some file recovery software, just waiting to see how much is left

Many thanks
__________
Lazaro

[yancek]

Your post isn't really clear to me but it sounds like you installed Mint on the external drive and meant to install it on the internal?? What does "removed all partitions " mean? Do you have an 80+GB internal drive with windows and Mint on the external? You likely installed Grub to the master boot record of the internal drive while the majority of Grubs files are on the external which is why it won't boot if the external is not attached.

Boot Mint and run the command: sudo fisk -l (lower case Letter L) from a terminal and post this partition information here. What do you want to do? Install Mint on the internal? external? which windows version do you have?

[Lazaro]

Apologies for my lack of response, i've been on holiday.

Thats exactly what I did, I meant to install it on the internal drive, and when Mint asked me if I wanted to remove all partitions on the drive and install linux over everything, I said yes. I assume it installed itself to the bigger of the two drives, the external drive I left connected to the computer.

You likely installed Grub to the master boot record of the internal drive while the majority of Grubs files are on the external which is why it won't boot if the external is not attached.

You must be right Yancek, when I boot the computer without the drive attached it tries to run Grub. The external drive is gone now anyway, I managed to recover many of the files with the help of someone who has a disk recovery program.

I had Windows XP installed on the internal drive originally, and I have an XP installation disk, but it wont boot from the disk when I restart the computer.

I will boot Mint from the live cd (which it will do), follow your instructions and post what I find next week when I am back in front of that computer.

Ideally now, I would probably like to have a dual boot with XP and Mint on the internal drive, while keeping my data on an external drive or in a drive partition separate from the two os's.

[Lazaro]

mint@mint ~ $ sudo fisk -l
sudo: fisk: command not found
mint@mint ~ $ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 82.0 GB, 81964302336 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9964 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x82bd82bd

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
mint@mint ~ $