Test disk partition rescue and boot-repair messup on Neon installation

[phonic-otg]

Well having primarily been happy at my test disk partition rescue with a live Neon USB (installed on a 64Gb drive) and the moving of files from said partition to the Neon partition.

I then had to fix my swap size and shrink the now empty partition for that swap resize. I had done that. Then a visit from a friend and his family took me away for a little. On returning forgetting to update grub I rebooted.

Getting the grub rescue again I went to my Super grub2 USB to boot in and it could not find any images. Booting Neon USB to check, the previously installed boot partition was missing so I ran boot repair from Neon USB it said it was successful. I rebooted and still the same grub rescue and super grub2 USB could still not find images.

I ran test disk again this time it said there was an MS partition structure, so I changed it to the one that came up on the original rescue for that drive which was the first on the selection list - EFI something (I cant quite remember at the moment and I'm too afraid right now to touch It further to check.) and it asked for a format type so I put ext4 it then showed functions for super blocks. This has taken me way out of my comfort zone. So I stopped.

Any help or suggestions are greatly welcome. I will have to also post on test disk forums too, its just that, I hoped to get some guidance from familiar people.

[vinnywright]

I ,,,,,think that their are to many unknown variables for any one to truly be able to help as of now .

like ,,,what was the partition layout of the drive before you started "fixing" it ,,,,witch partitions had installs , witch install was controlling grub , the location in the partitioning of the now shrunk partition and the swap partition so forth and so on .

the devils in the details ,,,,, and we have none

VINNY

[phonic-otg]

I ,,,,,think that their are to many unknown variables for any one to truly be able to help as of now .

like ,,,what was the partition layout of the drive before you started "fixing" it ,,,,witch partitions had installs , witch install was controlling grub , the location in the partitioning of the now shrunk partition and the swap partition so forth and so on .

the devils in the details ,,,,, and we have none

VINNY

You're absolutely right VINNY.
Really this public sook should of been posted in social/chat threads, hence the lack of data - which will come.
This just happened so I am all flustered and have the dreaded pit in the stomach each time I think of this.

[vinnywright]

This just happened so I am all flustered and have the dreaded pit in the stomach each time I think of this.

I am sure that we all understand that feeling,,,,,,,,,,,I know I do .

we have all at one time or another hit the wrong button at the wrong time or some thing to that affect and realized it ,,,,,,,just to late .

but all my not be lost yet ,,,gather your thoughts and get the details correct and think with a fresh set of ideas .

VINNY

[phonic-otg]

Thanks i need to gather my self.

My dilemma is most of the old partition state logs etc is on the now inaccessible partition with the Neon OS (sda2 starting sector 2048) unless some of the logs from my Neon USB's konsole initiated use of boot-repair and testdisk are to be found.
(the USB has persistence).

So (from recollection - wish I had an Eidetic memory) the initial install format of drive was the whole dive in ext4.

Whilst fixing the grub issues of the first install I had moved (vital-personal) files to the drive. Realising I had to move them off again, I created a new storage partition and moved those files there.
Reinstalled Neon on the now smaller original partition and fixed the grub issue by taking oshunluvers how-to advice, from a post, and used the beginning sectors of the drive from 1 to 2047 as a Boot partition for grub made with parted using the ef02 label and it became sda1 and made the grub install work great.
There I discovered I the swap was 1Mb, thinking back I recalled it should match the system RAM which is 32Gb. So using KDE partition manager I told it to shrink the new partition by 32Gb to the right and make the swap lager by the same amount and initiating.
I then realised I'd forgotten to move the files back to the other partition before doing so (Bugger), and sure enough it froze so I restarted to the new partitions of swap and now unallocated space.
Used test disk successfully to restore that partition to be able to move the files and then redo both swap and partition properly.
Booting in after resulted in grub rescue again so tried the Super Grub2 boot disk but this time there were no images to boot.
Using my Neon USB it showed the new partition sda3 and swap but not the sda1 partition. with my files that were copied to it, as I was not expecting that partition to be messed up. Which re-enforces the principle of ALWAYS back up!
Using test disk again it showed my sda2 partition to be MS and not its right one. So I thought it was fixed when I changed it back. But it's not.

So now I’ve got to find what reports I can as I did save some on the Neon USB and used rescue packages through its konsole.
Depending on the situation I may have to get a new HDD and start again. Keeping this current drive aside until I can comfortably rescue it.

Thanks again VINNY I needed an honest level headed approach to my panic.

[phonic-otg]

Update:
After a long delay.
I was not able to restore the original partitions but was able to get all my files and OS files with photorec, sadly with out their original file names. So now an arduous task of viewing ALL files and saving all important ones and junking the now unobtainable OS system files from 500 folders with 400-500 files each. Thankfully this is helped by photorec's sorting processes.

[GreyGeek]

Update:
After a long delay.
I was not able to restore the original partitions but was able to get all my files and OS files with photorec, sadly with out their original file names. So now an arduous task of viewing ALL files and saving all important ones and junking the now unobtainable OS system files from 500 folders with 400-500 files each. Thankfully this is helped by photorec's sorting processes.

Yup, I’d call a year a “long delay”!
A friend’s daughter was two weeks away from graduating when her computer HD crashed. She had spent 3 months In Wyoming as a forestry intern and written her thesis on it. She had 1,500 photos from the experience, along with some family photos. Photorec recovered her thesis and all but 5 photos. Saved her semester and her bacon!


Allow me to suggest the you re-install Neon but use Btrfs as the file system. Btrfs allows you to shrink or grow your pool and allows snapshots of you System that takes only seconds. Rollback takes only a few minutes. Offload snapshots to external storage mediums to backup. There is a subforum called BTRFS, under MISCELLANEOUS that contains useful information.

[phonic-otg]

Allow me to suggest the you re-install Neon but use Btrfs as the file system. Btrfs allows you to shrink or grow your pool and allows snapshots of you System that takes only seconds. Rollback takes only a few minutes. Offload snapshots to external storage mediums to backup. There is a subforum called BTRFS, under MISCELLANEOUS that contains useful information.

Thanks for the Btrfs advise looks right up my impatient alley.
I have enough drives now to give Neon a go again, I have a live USB 64gb with Neon.
Though right now my thoughts are turned to tuning my Kubuntu 18.04 install from freezing.

[dibl]

dibl's policy on backups: "You cannot have too many copies of your important data. You can only have too few. And 1 is too few."

[phonic-otg]

Schooled.

[oshunluvr]

+100 on dibl's comment. Also, testdisk and boot-repair type utilities are islands of last resort, not the first thing to go to.

BTW, it's super easy to make a backup of your partition table if you're using MBR. I used to do that whenever I partitioned a drive. For a GPT drive, a utility called sgdisk can do it pretty simply. Not a bad thing to add to your backups.

[GreyGeek]

My clients used to ask me "How often do we back up?" My response was, "How much data do you want to re-enter?".
Back then backup was to QIC tapes, which were not too reliable (stretching, breaking, flaking, etc...) and slow. The clients usually settled on noon and after work on backing up, limiting losses to half a day. When full backups got to large, for some clients, incremental backups were used M-Th and full backup taken after work on the last work day of the week.


For my personal laptop with very little of importance on it I send snapshots to my 2nd and 3rd HDs, and to an external USB HD.
It's a lot easier to restore a snapshot than to rebuild a system.