[Solved] corrupted partition table

fsckd · 2011-09-17 05:25:52

Yours truly was experimenting with alternative bootloaders today and ended up with a corrupted partition table. Yours truly had backed up the bootloader part of the MBR today but neglected to copy the rest. Guess who is feeling very stupid right now.

Here is what fdisk has to say about my disk,

root@sysresccd /root % fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 5
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 5
Warning: ignoring extra data in partition table 5
Warning: invalid flag 0x2404 of partition table 5 will be corrected by w(rite)

Disk /dev/sdb: 30.0 GB, 30020272128 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3649 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x4b36bdea

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *         895        3444    20482875    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2               1         894     7181023+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb3            3445        7476    32387040    5  Extended
/dev/sdb5   ?      142349      151007    69551332+  19  Unknown

Partition table entries are not in disk order

This looks somewhat promising. I had only three partitions on the disk (I don't remember if any were logical), one swap, one large thing for pacman stuff and of course root.

By suggestion of this I will try testdisk (version 6.11 from Sys Resc CD).

Last edited by fsckd (2011-09-17 21:22:59)

skodabenz · 2011-09-17 06:38:00

Try fixparts utility (from extra/gptfdisk package).

fsckd · 2011-09-17 21:22:31

Unfortunately my copy of sys resc cd does not have fixparts.

testdisk worked like a charm and my partitions were recovered, one swap, one JFS and one ext4.

(Incidentally it was Windows which damaged the MBR in the first place.)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-09-17 05:25:52

[Solved] corrupted partition table

#2 2011-09-17 06:38:00

Re: [Solved] corrupted partition table

#3 2011-09-17 21:22:31

Re: [Solved] corrupted partition table

Board footer