Arch Linux

jack.mitchell

Member

From: Ely, Cambridgeshire, UK

Registered: 2008-08-28

Posts: 156

Website

Partition Table Recovery

Hello everyone,

Well, yesterday I attempted to install arch onto my server, the first time round I checked all my hard drives and picked the correct drive to install to, my internet started to play up so I had to cancel and retry later, now I tried again later and assumed that the disk allocations had stayed the same, obviously not. I managed to reformat with an auto-use entire disk option my ntfs partiton with ~400gb of data on it. Now my internet started playing up again so I ciuld not even start the installation, i.e. I didnt even get past the downloading packages part. Is there a way to recover my ntfs partition and its data seeing as though I did not rewrite any of the data blocks due to the installation never starting?

thanks in advance, any help would be greatly appreciated!

Jack.

jack.mitchell

Member

From: Ely, Cambridgeshire, UK

Registered: 2008-08-28

Posts: 156

Website

Re: Partition Table Recovery

Ok, i've managed to get somewhere using Easy Recovery I have managed to find that all my files are still in tact!!! However it is requiring me to copy them all over to a new hard drive, now is there a way to just remake the partition table on the same drive and restore all the data?

Cheers,
Jack.

fukawi2

Ex-Administratorino

From: .vic.au

Registered: 2007-09-28

Posts: 6,224

Website

Re: Partition Table Recovery

In situations like this, rewriting ANYTHING to the disk (including the partition table) can be dangerous to the recovery of data. While writing the partition table should extend past the first 512 bytes on the disk, it could still screw it all.

If the files are valuable to you, then grab another hard drive and restore them to that. Borrow a friends temporarily if possible. Drives are cheap; I found a 500gb drive online the other day for US$70.

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Inkaine

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2008-07-14

Posts: 88

Re: Partition Table Recovery

I can recommend the tool testdisk, available for every OS you get to run. It fixed many corrupted partition tables for me in the past. If it's really only the partition table, it's the perfect programm for the job.