Zesty wont boot after USB stick partition and format

[Rod J]

Sounds like you've hosed your system to me.

You could try installing the "testdisk" utility which includes "photorec" ... these are terminal (command line) apps that can help recover partitions (testdisk) and data files (photorec) that are still intact. There's a slim chance you might get back some of your data. Testdisk won't be much use as it seems you have reinstalled the OS, but photorec might be able to get some of your data files back.

I think Vinny was meaning to try the Kmenu (Start menu) from the live DVD/USB ... in the System section you should find the utility "KDE Partition Manager". You can run this to check the condition of the partitions to see if they have been corrupted/wiped/deleted or whatever. The Partition Manager is much more comprehensive than the partition editor in the install process.

[SumBloke]

Thanks for the tips Rod. Yes I think you might be right about the hosing.

IN Partition manager I can see there is over 190gb of used space in my Linux partition, so it looks like it all is there, just that Kubuntu cant see it. Is that because its in the /home folder of a different user (my previous user name on previous install) ?

Ill try photorec sounds like a good shot, thanks again.

[SumBloke]

Yes there are defintely remnants of the previous user accounts on the HD somewhere. The system can see them but I cant enter them. How could I get into those and copy the files over to the new user account?

[Rod J]

It seems like the file system is corrupted somehow. You should be able to at least see the files even though they belong to another user ... it sounds like the file space is still allocated but is inaccessible just now. You could try running the Partition Manager from the live system then Right mouse click on the partition in question and choose "Check". Be aware though that if the checking program finds file system errors it could make things worse. If the check is successful you should be able to access the files (maybe). It's a long shot really. The best way would be to reformat the Linux partition(s) and then reinstall. Next step would be to restore your data from your backups ... you do have backups, don't you?

Regardless, whether the file system is corrupt or not, I believe the photorec utility will be able to recover some files, but again you won't get everything back and will have a lot of files that have cryptic filenames and no folder structure too. So, it's dubious if it's worth the effort really.

Backups are a nuisance to do but they are an insurance against foul ups like you're experiencing now.

[SumBloke]

Yes have backups. But its a big job. If I could access those folders it would save me a couple of days.
I guess i need to be able to access the disk using a command and try from there. System is still updating.
Thanks for the help guys :-)

[SumBloke]

This tool might help if you have a similar problem
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2011/...r-private.html

[SumBloke]

Oh No!
Its happened again! Somehow the HDD partitions seem to have been messed up, mount points deleted, by trying to format a USB stick!

I had an encrypted drive set up this time on a different machine. I booted from a USB and ran KDE Partition Manager and had some trouble getting an image off of the machine! (It wouldn't let me save anything to the usb! - so many problems to conquer!) SO I had to take a photo! please dont laugh! well alright then...

Here is the screen shot of the KDE partition manage, does anyone know how to get this booting again?

[SumBloke]

on a reboot the partitions get re-mounted ,,,so if you unmounted them doing somthing wile playing with the USB drive a reboot would have re mounted it.

re boot the live USB BUT do not start the installer ,,,just boot it to the desktop ,then open a konsole and run

sudo parted -l

and post the output.

and or use the partition manager on the live system to look at the partitions and see that thay look as you would expect them to and still have "used"space in them ,,,,,,see that thay are not blank as in just formated.

VINNY

VINNY

Finally managed to get this together, Just to confirm ,this is the same problem, but a different machine, in reference to my original post

Apologies for image quality!





These were taken after booting intoa USB stick. 300gb drive.

[vinnywright]

Oh No!
Its happened again! Somehow the HDD partitions seem to have been messed up, mount points deleted, by trying to format a USB stick!

I had an encrypted drive set up this time on a different machine. I booted from a USB and ran KDE Partition Manager and had some trouble getting an image off of the machine! (It wouldn't let me save anything to the usb! - so many problems to conquer!) SO I had to take a photo! please dont laugh! well alright then...

Here is the screen shot of the KDE partition manage, does anyone know how to get this booting again?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]7087[/ATTACH]

Aaaa you have an encrypted file system ,,,I have no 0 appearance with that ,,,, and will half to back out of this one

VINNY

[SumBloke]

Fair enough Vinny thanks anyway. Any reason why you dont bother with encryption?

I have just ran

sudo fdisk -l

from the command line in Emergency Mode (system is booting into emergency mode) and there is a column titled 'Boot'
Looking around online it looks as though my main partition should be marked there with an asterix to indicate that this is the boot device. For me though this column is blank.

Am I on the right tracks? How can the main drive be edited to make the OS use it as a boot drive?

[SumBloke]

Here's an example to show what I mean

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 * 2048 1431805951 1431803904 682.8G 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1431807998 1465147391 33339394 15.9G 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1431808000 1465147391 33339392 15.9G 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Thats not my drive, just something i copied from another site. See the boot column, the asterix denoting which drive the OS should boot from, mine is missing.
I think the solution should be similar to the solution for this on Windows, i.e edit the MBR to add the right tag. How can I do do this safely in Kubuntu?
Would that be enough to get me back up and running?
Ive been searching for the tool or command but at a loss, if anyone has any ideas that would be great.

[vinnywright]

the "boot flag" is not so important in linux ,,,,just that grub nows what to boot and where it's boot info is ,,,,,,,,I have 5 OS's on a 500GB drive and only one of the partitions has a boot flag set and it is not even the one that has the grub info that is being used on boot .

I do not see a need for encryption ,,,for me .

my box never leaves the house (so no chance of some one else ending up with it ) and their is nothing so sensitive on it as to think it has to be so protected ,,,,,my box offers no connectible services to the outside world via the Internet so I doubt anyone will walk/hack their way in .

and it just produces more overhead and chances for things to go wrong for little benefit ,,,,,for me.

VINNY

[SumBloke]

"More chances to go wrong." Now he tells me!

Managed to get a photo of /etc/fstab I think it looks a bit of a mess.
This is when normal boot fails and it goes into emergency mode. Its not when booting from an USB stick or cdrom



I edited out the USERID info just in case. Was that warranted?

I think I need to know: 1 what is wrong 2 What tools or commands i need to get it booting again. I wish I knew the correct terminology in order to ask teh right questions.

Vinny how to you manage dependencies and installs etc on an offline machine? That's expert level right? Manually managing dependencies? A bit OT i suppose but interesting as I tried and failed to do that.

Thanks

[vinnywright]

your attachment link is broken .

as to a of line box ,, you can install to a of line box ,,,,then if you go to add a app ,,,,, it can get tricky ,,,you can look at the apps depends(assuming your on an online box) ,,,,,

vinny@vinny-Bonobo-Extreme:~$ apt show testdisk
Package: testdisk
Version: 7.0-1
Priority: optional
Section: universe/admin
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Original-Maintainer: Jean-Michel Kelbert <kelbert@debian.org>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 1,241 kB
[COLOR=#ff0000]Depends: e2fslibs (>= 1.41.0), libc6 (>= 2.14), libjpeg8 (>= 8c), libncursesw5 (>= 6), libntfs-3g861, libtinfo5 (>= 6), libuuid1 (>= 2.16), zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4), ntfs-3g[/COLOR]
Download-Size: 324 kB
APT-Sources: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
Description: Partition scanner and disk recovery tool, and PhotoRec file recovery tool
TestDisk checks the partition and boot sectors of your disks.
It is very useful in forensics, recovering lost partitions.
It works with :
* DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
* NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP )
* Linux Ext2 and Ext3
* BeFS ( BeOS )
* BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
* CramFS (Compressed File System)
* HFS and HFS+, Hierarchical File System
* JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
* Linux Raid
* Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
* LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
* Netware NSS
* ReiserFS 3.5 and 3.6
* Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
* UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...)
* XFS, SGI's Journaled File System
.
PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover
lost pictures from digital camera memory or even Hard Disks.
It has been extended to search also for non audio/video headers.
It searches for following files and is able to undelete them:
* Sun/NeXT audio data (.au)
* RIFF audio/video (.avi/.wav)
* BMP bitmap (.bmp)
* bzip2 compressed data (.bz2)
* Source code written in C (.c)
* Canon Raw picture (.crw)
* Canon catalog (.ctg)
* FAT subdirectory
* Microsoft Office Document (.doc)
* Nikon dsc (.dsc)
* HTML page (.html)
* JPEG picture (.jpg)
* MOV video (.mov)
* MP3 audio (MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1) (.mp3)
* Moving Picture Experts Group video (.mpg)
* Minolta Raw picture (.mrw)
* Olympus Raw Format picture (.orf)
* Portable Document Format (.pdf)
* Perl script (.pl)
* Portable Network Graphics (.png)
* Raw Fujifilm picture (.raf)
* Contax picture (.raw)
* Rollei picture (.rdc)
* Rich Text Format (.rtf)
* Shell script (.sh)
* Tar archive (.tar )
* Tag Image File Format (.tiff)
* Microsoft ASF (.wma)
* Sigma/Foveon X3 raw picture (.x3f)
* zip archive (.zip)

and make sure all of those are present on the of line box and/or dl them as well to be added with the app ,,,,,but that dose not show the depends of some of those apps that were the depends of the original app so yes this can get tricky .

if you can at all posably get net to the of lie box just to do the addition of packages (and an update once in a wile) it would be preferable .

VINNY

[SumBloke]

[QUOTE=vinnywright;403103]your attachment link is broken .