HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

[sweeney276]

I've got a 64bit computer with two 120gig hard drives (one for data, the other one for Kubuntu).

My three year old granddaughter was watching Grandad load some disks on my system to copy. I shut the door and left with her, and bolted the door. A bit later we couldn't find her, so we looked everywhere and I noticed that the computer room door was unbolted. So I went in and there she was sitting at the computer "just like Granddad".

When I looked at what she'd been doing, she'd been playing with my disk of Part Magic and she'd completely wiped my first hard drive (/dev/sda1) as well as fouling up my data hard drive (/dev/sdb1). Needless to say I'll be securing the door even more now and making sure the computer's off when I leave it...

The thing is...I can't get Kubuntu to reinstall now. /dev/sda1 doesn't appear now and I get a message along the lines there is no boot medium and I need to reboot with bootable medium, AFTER I've reinstalled Kubuntu. Can anyone help me get anything running again?

I've tried other KDE based distros and Ubuntu...all with the same result - nothing. So any help you can give would be greatly appreciated.

[muzicman0]

Re: HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

I would think that the Kubuntu installer would see the disk, even if it's not partitioned, but it may not. I would boot a live cd, install some partitioning software, and wipe/re partition the drives properly. Reformat as whatever you want (ext3?), and try again. Obviously, this will mean that all data that might be remaining, if any will be gone for good.

mm0

[dibl]

Re: HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

Yeah, what muzicman said.

FYI, 120G is about 10X what you really need for the Kubuntu OS. Since you're starting over anyway ( ), you could used your Part Magic CD and repartition the Linux drive to, say 10G for the OS and 110G for data (don't forget to make a little swap space). Or if you're in the habit of collecting CD ISO images or something, make it 20G. But you sure don't need 120G, and all the data in there is subject to the hazards that could theoretically happen to your OS.

[flarson]

Re: HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

There is some confusion here. /dev/sda1 is a partition, not a disk. The disk is /dev/sda and /dev/sda1 is the first partition on it.

It sounds like you have run the Kubuntu installer and reinstalled and after the reinstall you can not boot. Is that correct? Does the installer think it sees /dev/sda?

That seems to indicate you can boot from the CD. Is your BIOS set to allow booting from the hard disk? Does the BIOS recognize that you have 2 hard disks? If you can boot into the live CD you could run
"parted -s /dev/sda print" and
"parted -s /dev/sdb print".

[sweeney276]

Re: HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

Thanks for all the help.

Just to clear up some confusion. I generally use two hard drives, one for my "/" partition and another for my "/home" partition. I described these as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb in case that was significant. In actuality, there is one hard disk for the OS and another for my /home partition in which I keep data. The disk I use to look at partitions, etc, is "PARTED MAGIC" and not "Part Magic" as I mistyped. Finally, not needing two 120gig hard drives? True, but that is what came with the computer my wife bought for me, and yes, I DO collect .iso images to pass on.

Sorry for the delay in answering but we here in the UK have been subject to power cuts and Virgin Media playing up over this last week, so I've kept away from ANY activity on the computer until now (I'm using the wife's laptop right now). Today, the message on the screen has changed to something like "array 1 is not recognised", which I assume means that a RAID configuration had been set up, which is news to me.

So it looks like I've got a reinstallation job on my hands. Should I just buy a new SATA hard drive (they are very cheap these days) and install all but the /home partition on it? Or does something more need to be done?

[I am buying stocks and making a pillory for my granddaughter for when she is here]

[dibl]

Re: HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

The disk I use to look at partitions, etc, is "PARTED MAGIC" and not "Part Magic" as I mistyped. Finally, not needing two 120gig hard drives?

Ha ha ha -- and I repeated your error, and I also use Parted Magic -- I should know better! :P

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear about the drive size vs partition size. Get all the hard drive space you can afford -- I'm sitting at 1.9T myself, in 4 drives. But, what I was referring to is the sensible partition size for the installed OS. Bearing in mind that you might wish to re-install the OS one day, but not mess with your data, it doesn't make good sense to me to have the data on the same partition as the OS. The basic OS can easily fit within a 6G partition. I happen to have an 8G VM machine, that runs best in the /home partition, so I just put the whole thing in a 16G partition. But all my music, images, and documents are on their own partitions, separate from the OS. You can symlink the data into your /home/user folder to make it easily accessible.

[Monster_user]

Re: HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

So it looks like I've got a reinstallation job on my hands. Should I just buy a new SATA hard drive (they are very cheap these days) and install all but the /home partition on it? Or does something more need to be done?

I'm not sure what another drive would do. Have you tried repartitioning the two drives as Ext3 partitions. Or maybe Fat32? Sometimes FAT works better,... Then try to install Kubuntu.

[sweeney276]

Re: HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

Thanks dibl, that's my understanding, too. Some of my friends have had problems with more that one OS in separate partitions on one drive. So I'm more comfortable in having the OS sans data on the one drive, and data on another drive - though your point is well made. I use an external drive for music and another for movies, too. Plus a third external hard drive for backups...

Thank monster_user that sounds good - completely partition my OS drive and then reinstall. I'm a bit nervous about doing it to my data drive because there might still be some data on it (stupidly I hadn't backed up my data for some time ). I'll let you know how I get on......

As far as my granddaughter is concerned, a pair of handcuffs and a journey to Horsham in West Sussex may be all that's necessary (see photo at http://www.francisfrith.co.uk/horsha...-2004_H119714/ )

[Monster_user]

Re: HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

Thank monster_user that sounds good - completely partition my OS drive and then reinstall. I'm a bit nervous about doing it to my data drive because there might still be some data on it (stupidly I hadn't backed up my data for some time ). I'll let you know how I get on......

If the Data drive is badly corrupted, you may need to disconnect it, until you can run a recovery utility on it. On the rare occasion I've had a drive become so degraded, it would cause a conflict with the other drives.

[sweeney276]

Re: HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

Thanks Monster_user. What recovery software/device would you recommend with Kubuntu?

[Monster_user]

Re: HELP!! Granddaughter hosed my PC!

Unfortunately, I'm still a rookie when it comes to recovering data.

You should be able to create a backup of your data, even as corrupted as it is, using either partimage, or Norton Ghost. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with either program. You would need a larger drive to image the data to,...

The program I used was a little tool called "Testdisk", which should be available via Adept. It is an advanced tool that can be used to recover deleted partitions, or rebuild partition tables. However, it can also damage the partitions further.

I foolishly neglected to image my drive before running the program. I was fortunate enough to recover the partition however.

What actually happened was, I used Ghost to transfer my data to a larger drive. I then ran Norton Anti-virus, it detected a change in the MBR, and restored the one for the smaller drive, corrupting the partition.