I resized the Root Partition and now everything is gone.

Xeno_Idaltu · 2019-09-29 13:39:23

Five partitions.
An EFI Partition, Swap Partition, and three Operating Systems.

1) I was running out of space on my last partition (/dev/sda5), so I was forced to absorb the Swap Partition to the left (dev/sda4)

When I tried to boot the Operating System on /dev/sda5 I got this error:
'/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/normal.mod" not found

2) Using a Live CD I found out that the Terminal and Dolphin show nothing but a directory named "Lost+Found"
I was shocked, but according to KDE Partition /dev/sda5 still has the 15GB of files it had before the incident.

3) I tried the fsck command but found no errors.

4) I had resized/shrank partitions countless times but never tried editing the beginning of a partition until now.

5) Is the issue still fixable?
* By the way /dev/sda is only for Operating System Files, I have /dev/sdb for storage but this will be a cool learning experience if a solution is possible.

Last edited by Xeno_Idaltu (2019-09-29 13:43:06)

Trilby · 2019-09-29 13:43:01

How exactly did you "absorb the swap partition"? What tool(s) did you use? What were the commands and output?

2ManyDogs · 2019-09-29 13:43:08

What tool did you use to resize the partition? Are you sure the resized root partition is still sda5?

Not an Installation issue, moving to Newbie Corner.

Xeno_Idaltu · 2019-09-29 14:10:26

I used KDE Partition Manager
I Resized /dev/sda5 three times.

1) On the first try I only took 2GB because I was thinking on deleting unwanted files/programs later on. I had a time limit on my laptop, but I wanted to try a very old game. (Ended up not playing because of exhaustion)
2) The next day I decided to just delete the Swap Partition and expand the capacity of /dev/sda5. It gave errors, but I was so sleepy to read it, so I assumed nothing had changed because the Partition Process canceled on itself and the Swap Partition was intact. I decided to just use a Live USB because I was going to resize /dev/sda5 anyways. After the expansion process had ended I tried to boot the OS and it failed on me.

I call it "Root Partition" because it is mounted on /

Last edited by Xeno_Idaltu (2019-09-29 14:20:11)

Swiggles · 2019-09-29 14:24:39

Did you call (assuming ext4)

resize2fs /dev/sda5

after resizing the partition?

Last edited by Swiggles (2019-09-29 14:25:00)

shulamy · 2019-09-29 14:36:01

you can try "testdisk" to go back to the original partitions

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/File_recovery

ezik

Trilby · 2019-09-29 14:57:11

You shrunk the root partition to 2GB? What was it before that? If you shrank the partition to 2GB, it's not surprising that anything outside that range could be lost, though it still begs the question of whether you resized the filesystem. I'm not sure what would happen if you shrank a partition to smaller than the filesystem it contained, but I'd certainly not expect it to end well.

As for the second resize - there were errors that you didn't bother to note, so there's no way anyone here could know what went wrong, but something did.

So there were at least two likely data-destructive processes that happened before you resized the partition from the live USB - which you didn't specify what commands or tools you used for that, KDE partition manager isn't available on arch isos.

Given all this, I suspect you're pretty much S.O.L. As noted above, if there were critically important files there, you may be able to recover some, but frankly when you don't even seem to know what has happened or what was done and given that it was none of your data (just system files), it'd be easier to just start from scratch to reinstall the system.

Xeno_Idaltu · 2019-09-29 16:46:17

Before the incident. I had 10GB of Swap Partition and 17GB on /dev/sda5.

It had been weeks since I had last used /dev/sda5 and because it's a rolling release I had +1,000 updates.

First I took 2GB from the Swap Partition, the next day I deleted it and took all 10GB, making /dev/sda5 totaling 27GB.

Now, this is the strange thing. It looks like my filesystem has been deleted but the files are still there, probably hidden or something.

I did this commands on Grub Rescue>
set boot=(hd0,gpt5)
set prefix=(hd0,gpt5)/boot/grub
insmod normal
(((It gives this error))))
error: file'/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/normal.mod' not found

Next command I did:
ls (hd0,gpt5)

Output:
(hd0,gpt5): Filesystem is ext2.

Shouldn't the output be?
(hd0,gpt5): Filesystem is ext4

Arch Linux

#1 2019-09-29 13:39:23

I resized the Root Partition and now everything is gone.

#2 2019-09-29 13:43:01

Re: I resized the Root Partition and now everything is gone.

#3 2019-09-29 13:43:08

Re: I resized the Root Partition and now everything is gone.

#4 2019-09-29 14:10:26

Re: I resized the Root Partition and now everything is gone.

#5 2019-09-29 14:24:39

Re: I resized the Root Partition and now everything is gone.

#6 2019-09-29 14:36:01

Re: I resized the Root Partition and now everything is gone.

#7 2019-09-29 14:57:11

Re: I resized the Root Partition and now everything is gone.

#8 2019-09-29 16:46:17

Re: I resized the Root Partition and now everything is gone.

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