Ahhh! Corrupt hard disk!

[Neon_Knight]

I'm on my live CD at the moment.

Basically, I tried to change my graphics card to a newer one, and found that the new one was faulty, so I switched it back again. During this process, the hard disks were unplugged and replugged again. (I have 4 hard disks by the way)

Well now the grub can't load, it comes up with an error 21 (sometimes 22 depending on what the arrangement of SATA cables is). Well after booting into the liveCD, and running Gparted I can see that my 250GB hard drive which used to be split up into more or less 200GB for Ubuntu boot partition and 40GB for Windows (10GB swap) is now as one 232GB "unknown" filesystem with a little warning triangle next to it. And 7.84MB of unpartitioned space.

Is there any possible way to fix this? I don't know how it got corrupt - perhaps it got knocked inside the PC? I don't know but I want to know if Ubuntu LiveCD offers any way to fix this.

Surely all of my data is still there? I mean it can't just have gone. That's 250GB, some of it quite important, I'm not too keen to just start formatting...

I'll do that if the worst comes to the worst, but I'd rather not have to.

Thanks for any help you can give.

[LewRockwell]

you'll need to do this

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

[marshall.robert]

I would also recommend making sure they are plugged in in the same order as they were before you replaced the GPU. Just to be safe.

[ajgreeny]

Backups? If you have some, what's the problem with reformatting?

[Neon_Knight]

I would also recommend making sure they are plugged in in the same order as they were before you replaced the GPU. Just to be safe.

Ah that's just the thing, I have no idea what order they were in before I replaced the GPU.


And the problem with formatting is losing my data. I can't make any backups because I can't access the partitions because the partition type is "unknown" and it isn't auto-mounted at start (when all other partitions on other disk have mounted) which leads me to assume that there's a reason why it can't be mounted. (Especially considering, to Ubuntu's eyes, the two partitions have merged into one. I wouldn't like to see the results of that mount)

[Neon_Knight]

Also, I'm currently running

sudo gpart /dev/sda -W /dev/sda

(which I found from google)

in the terminal and it's output

Begin scan...
Possible extended partition at offset(7mb)
Possible partition(Windows NT/W2K FS), size(45786mb), offset(7mb)

Which means it's seen my 40GB NTFS drive. I'm not sure exactly what it's done - Gparted looks the same.. somebody inform me if I've wrecked my chances of recovering my data, please.


And - TestDisk seems geared towards recovering NTFS - I have one NTFS and one Ext2/3 (can't remember exactly..), so is that going to be a problem?

[LewRockwell]

Ah that's just the thing, I have no idea what order they were in before I replaced the GPU.

this information should have been disclosed in the original post, btw...

[Neon_Knight]

this information should have been disclosed in the original post, btw...

I'm sorry, I didn't think of that.

Anyway it's only the one hard disk that's corrupt, the others have mounted just fine, so it's just a case of finding out which hard disk it is that's corrupted and repairing it.. right?

[marshall.robert]

Well it could be a case of simply rewriting the partition table to the correct one, leaving your data intact (hopefully). I couldn't tell you what the commands or anything are, but I came across a situation where I had to do a similar thing.

[Neon_Knight]

Well I've used TestDisk and it successfully found my partitions and I could browse my files in that, and so I restored the partition table.

I rebooted, and now I have the linux swap partition restored to normal, but the NTFS and the Ext3 partitions are both merged back into "unknown". Anything I can do about that?