Arch Linux

ancient_archer

Member

From: Slovakia

Registered: 2010-03-13

Posts: 107

[SOLVED] partition damaged

Hello!

Yesterday I did a really dumb mistake. Since I got a new laptop (it is without CD/DVD drive however), I immediately wanted to install Arch Linux on that

However, when creating USB bootable image of Arch (on another computer), I ran this command:

sudo dd if=archlinux-2010.05-core-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdb

But sdb was my second HDD with 3 FAT 32 partitions! Sdc was USB key and I ran sdb! Hopefully, there were only some old Win98 games and some backup data so nothing extremely important was deleted! However, I lost a lot of saved positions though

So when I immediately noticed it, I stopped the terminal, ran Gparted and there was nothing allocated there!
Therefore I ran Parted magic live CD and restored the partition table by using this command:

gpart -W /dev/hdb /dev/hdb

However, it recovered only 2 partitions (both of them are fine), the first one remained uncovered.

Now the question is:
Do you think that there is a way to recover data from the first lost partition? Or are they vanished forever? I tried to do something with testdisk but no results...

Interesting thing is that when I run Gparted, there is an unallocated space at the start of the disk in the size of the first partition...

REALLY THANKS for any ideas.

Last edited by ancient_archer (2010-07-25 13:50:19)

Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: [SOLVED] partition damaged

the dd command started from the start of the first partition. So when you stopped it in the middle, it had only finished screwing up the initial sectors of the first partition. Therefore you were able to recover the other 2 partitions.

gPart also gave you as much as was recoverable. So I don't think you would be able to do any more than this, unfortunately.

The initial sectors of a partition normally contain information about how big the partition is and the partition boundaries, since you lost that, it would be mighty difficult to get the data back. There might be certain ways..but would probably take a lot of effort and time.

Last edited by Inxsible (2010-07-22 19:43:59)

---

Forum Rules

There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !

skodabenz

Banned

From: Tamilnadu, India

Registered: 2010-04-11

Posts: 382

Re: [SOLVED] partition damaged

Try testdisk or photorec. Testdisk for lost partitions and photorec for file recovery.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Last edited by skodabenz (2010-07-23 15:53:22)

---

My new forum user/nick name is "the.ridikulus.rat" .

ancient_archer

Member

From: Slovakia

Registered: 2010-03-13

Posts: 107

Re: [SOLVED] partition damaged

Well, I of course tried testdisk but it didn´t help.

Inxsible, thanks for useful input.

Finally, I decided to format unused space at the beginning of the disk.
I considered that nothing really extremely important was there and potential retrieval of files would be too time consuming.

Thanks again.

Last edited by ancient_archer (2010-07-25 13:49:37)