As a follow up, I was able to find a *free* program to attempt to recover my lost data. (I can't find the name of the program in a quick search, if anyone's interested I'll check my system at home tonight and post it). The software was able to see the lost partitions, but there was a huge amount of CRC errors in trying to read the disk. So I suspect there was a failure of the physical drive itself, more than just mere corruption of the partition table. This was a drive that fell on the floor once, but seemed ok when I installed Centos on it, so I left it in the system. Maybe it was already weak, and the erratic electricity killed it for good. I was able to recover quite a bit of lost data, but a lot of it appears to be gone forever. This is a good reminder on the importance of keeping backups of important stuff. Paul -------------- Original message ---------------------- From: "William L. Maltby" <BillsCentOS@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
--- Begin Message ---
- To: CentOS General List <centos@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Subject: Re: [CentOS] Restoring data from disk w/ messed up partition tables
- From: "William L. Maltby" <BillsCentOS@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:09:35 +0000
On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 20:54 +0000, techlists@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > Unfortunately, I do *not* remember the original partition settings. In that case, I suggest that you immediately get a full disk image saved somewhere safe so that you can play with it at your convenience. In the *IX world, "dd" will do a raw copy for you. There are also some Win*- based ones (row-something-or-another). Copies to another large HD or to CD (can be ISO format, but *IX can also write as ext*, tar, cpio onto the media). > > I was hoping to find a live CD that could fix such disasters (i.e. systemrescueCD, or some such thing). I did find a Windows based program that's supposed to do the trick. The evaluation edition lets you see if it can see your lost data; you have to buy it ($79) to actually be able to recover the data. This was at: > > http://www.stellarinfo.com/linux-data-recovery.htm > > I'm sure there must be an open source trick somewhere that should work though. That's probably true. I'm sure that a Guru or two has had to recover and decided that it was with a program. Start googling for that. Another possibility: google for the MBR layout. If your loss was just the flag (IIRC, x'05') indicating a valid partition got stomped, you might have an easy out yet. Lots can be done with "dd" and a few good utils. Even if the flag is lost, you might find partition information in those first (two) blocks on trk0, cyl0. > > Paul > <snip> > HTH and, need I say it, I wish you lots of luck and good backups in the future. -- BillAttachment: signature.asc
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