Killed hard drive boot, how to recover data

[pwright2]

While trying to use a Windows CD to install to an external drive, something has munged the Edgy Eft boot from my internal drive. I figured I could use the live CD to try to recover my data but it doesn't see the hard drive except in qtparted. There I can see my data partition as /dev/hda2 and formatted as ext3. Size and amount used looks OK.

I tried sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hda2 /media and the command executed without a error but the partition doesn't show up.

How can I reach and get data from this drive/partition?

-----Paul-----

[penguin.ch]

Re: Killed hard drive boot, how to recover data

For alternative, you could restore the (Linux) boot loader, for example by means of this tool. - Accessing your files from a live system, however, should be possible as well ... just to check:

- create mountpoint: sudo mkdir /media/hda2 && chmod 777 /media/hda2
- mount device: sudo mount -v -t ext3 -o rw,users /dev/hda2 /media/hda2

If this does not work, please enter fdisk -l in the live system's console and post the resulting output to this forum.

HTH
Birdy

[pwright2]

Re: Killed hard drive boot, how to recover data

I've downloaded the SuperGrub but haven't used it yet. I tried the two commands you provided.

sudo mkdir /media/hda2 && chmod 777 /media/hda2

The chmod portion of that failed until I moved to the /media directory and ran it as sudo. Seemed to work OK then.

sudo mount -v -t ext3 -o rw,users /dev/hda2 /media/hda2

That seemed to work fine and there is an hda2 folder in /media.

Unfortunately, it is empty. So, either everything has been blown out of hda2 or something else is wrong. qtPartEd shows 10GB of the 48GB hda2 is occupied, so I'm hoping the data is still there.

fdisk -l had to be run as root, but it gave the following:
Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 706 5670913+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 * 707 7061 51046537+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 7062 7296 1887637+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 7062 7296 1887606 82 Linux swap / Solaris

There is a bad section at the beginning of the drive, which is why hda1 is there. hda2 should be OS and data. hda3 is an artifact of the partitioning process and hda5 is the swap partition. I have no idea what happened to hda4.

I'm off to try SuperGrub.


------Paul-----

[pwright2]

Re: Killed hard drive boot, how to recover data

Penguin.ch, you (and SuperGrub) have saved me much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. All seems to be well and I thank you muchly.

-----Paul------