Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 123 LastLast
Results 11 to 20 of 22

Thread: Problems dual boot, Help!!

  1. #11
    Join Date
    May 2010
    Location
    UK - England
    Beans
    123
    Distro
    Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

    Re: Problems dual boot, Help!!

    You are pretty much in a terrible situation, how valuable is it to get the data back?

    When you delete a partition / format a disk, all the data that was present doesnt disappear, it just becomes in inaccessible unless it has been physically over written with data.

    So if your Ubuntu installation has not overwritten the same disk location containing an important document then it is possible to recover that document using programs such as photorec which use data carving techniques to recover files.

    However this is a long process and can only be achieved using a separate system.

    And the real bummer is if all your original content (the files you wish to recover) has been over written with new data then you wont be able to recover it.

    I think you should start re-writing your thesis.

  2. #12
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Pikes Peak
    Beans
    1,175
    Distro
    Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Problems dual boot, Help!!

    Time out please. I don't think this is such a mess. sda2 is the windows partition and it looks good. sda3 is the ubuntu install and it looks good. sda6 is an unknown linux partition and it has an issue. The mbr isn't reporting errors in the boot script. Time out for a bit and let's look in more detail and make sure the next step is right. I want to stop you from doing something destructive so I'm going to post this now and look into this in more depth. I also know of a few users that are real good at this and I'll see if any of them appear to be on line and ask them to take a look.
    Jim
    Toshiba Satellite L505-S6946
    Precise, Fedora, Kororaa, Bodhi

  3. #13
    Join Date
    May 2010
    Location
    UK - England
    Beans
    123
    Distro
    Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

    Re: Problems dual boot, Help!!

    Blasphemist, I am going according to the fdisk output.

    Do you believe it is wrong? Is the bootscript output more reliable?

    Code:
    Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
    Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x0748d562
    
       Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
    /dev/sda1            2048    27265023    13631488   27  Unknown
    /dev/sda2   *    27265024    27469823      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
    /dev/sda3        27469824   222782323    97656250   83  Linux
    /dev/sda4       222783486   976771071   376993793    5  Extended
    /dev/sda5       222783488   226689023     1952768   82  Linux swap / Solaris
    /dev/sda6       226691072   976771071   375040000   83  Linux

  4. #14
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Beans
    1,151

    Re: Problems dual boot, Help!!

    Quote Originally Posted by Ad@m View Post
    Blasphemist, I am going according to the fdisk output.

    Do you believe it is wrong? Is the bootscript output more reliable?
    Well fdisk is only used to find partition number, type, and size. It does not show much; however, bootscript does that plus alot more. Made by forum geniuses.

    OP, I wonder what is the integrity of your whole windows partition.

    I wonder if you can get a windows repair disk and use chkdsk. I cant find any problems with you boot script. What brand do you have? I might want to avoid it lol

    If that passes the chkdsk. I say get is window 7 or vista recovery cd and repair the boot files. That might also be the issue.

    If all of those have failed, windows has screwed us with a new version of ntfs
    Last edited by idoitprone; July 15th, 2011 at 09:08 PM.
    (\ /)
    (O.o)
    (> <)
    This is Bunny. Copy Bunny into your signature to help him on his way to world domination.

  5. #15
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Pikes Peak
    Beans
    1,175
    Distro
    Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Problems dual boot, Help!!

    First, I did ask one of the moderators that is very good to take a look at this thread. Hopefully he'll have a chance to do that.

    I do see what you are referring to adam in that sda2 is real little. So to me it doesn't seem deleted but rather really shrunken. Davide, could you tell us the complete sequence of events in as much detail as you can? Somehow 2 partitions for linux got created, sda 3 and sda6, and sda3 didn't get created in the extended partition as would be normal.

    David or Davide, I don't know if that was a typo earlier, there may be bad news ahead but lets not give up. As Adam said, this could be bad if sda3 has overwritten what was where windows was on the disk. There are some pretty good utils and people with skills here though. Try this for if you would. Boot to the live cd and run GParted. Please post screen shots of sda. Also, try to mount sda2 and sda3 from that program. Then run nautilus, the file manager, and see what if anything can be seen on those partitions. You can right click on a partition in GParted to mount it. I don't think we should go further than that just yet unless someone comes up with a good and safe plan.
    Jim
    Toshiba Satellite L505-S6946
    Precise, Fedora, Kororaa, Bodhi

  6. #16
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Beans
    1,151

    Re: Problems dual boot, Help!!

    Quote Originally Posted by Blasphemist View Post
    First, I did ask one of the moderators that is very good to take a look at this thread. Hopefully he'll have a chance to do that.

    I do see what you are referring to adam in that sda2 is real little. So to me it doesn't seem deleted but rather really shrunken. Davide, could you tell us the complete sequence of events in as much detail as you can? Somehow 2 partitions for linux got created, sda 3 and sda6, and sda3 didn't get created in the extended partition as would be normal.

    David or Davide, I don't know if that was a typo earlier, there may be bad news ahead but lets not give up. As Adam said, this could be bad if sda3 has overwritten what was where windows was on the disk. There are some pretty good utils and people with skills here though. Try this for if you would. Boot to the live cd and run GParted. Please post screen shots of sda. Also, try to mount sda2 and sda3 from that program. Then run nautilus, the file manager, and see what if anything can be seen on those partitions. You can right click on a partition in GParted to mount it. I don't think we should go further than that just yet unless someone comes up with a good and safe plan.

    lol Your 666th bean you demon
    (\ /)
    (O.o)
    (> <)
    This is Bunny. Copy Bunny into your signature to help him on his way to world domination.

  7. #17
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Pikes Peak
    Beans
    1,175
    Distro
    Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Problems dual boot, Help!!

    I know, I wish I could keep it at 666 somehow

    I wonder is sda6 is just not formatted. If so, that may be good for recovery. Anyway, please tell me just what went on with running testdisk. What did it show and what did you do with it? How did you stop it and has it told you of any helpful status or issues?

    Can sdb partitions be mounted and accessed from booting to the cd? If so good as that would provide a place to copy to if anything can be salvaged along the way.
    Jim
    Toshiba Satellite L505-S6946
    Precise, Fedora, Kororaa, Bodhi

  8. #18
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Pikes Peak
    Beans
    1,175
    Distro
    Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Problems dual boot, Help!!

    Since we haven't heard back on the answers to the questions yet, I have been looking at the testdisk wiki. I'm real interested to know if the deeper search might find your thesis. I'd be real careful with what you do in testdisk but I do think it may help a lot. I know I've seen someone involved in that project on these forums and maybe they'll see this.
    Jim
    Toshiba Satellite L505-S6946
    Precise, Fedora, Kororaa, Bodhi

  9. #19
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Beans
    46

    Re: Problems dual boot, Help!!

    I'm rather tired so apologise in advance for the quality of this post.

    I've sort of skim read this so I may be wrong in what I'm saying but to me it looks like the situation is as follows;

    • Windows 7 (unlike XP) uses a seperate boot partition. I think in this case that's sda2. The boot partition doesn't contain any user data.
    • sda1 was your windows operating system partition with all your data on.
    • when resizing the disk (if you did resize the partition instead of delete it) something screwed up and destroyed the partition.
    • the data is most likely still there on that partition and can potentially be recovered.
    • the more you use your computer the more likely it is that your data can be overwritten (as the space is unallocated and can be used as far as the computer is interested)

    To fix this I would download Hiren's Boot CD and see if any of the data recovery software can get your data back. Failing this you could professionally pay for your data to get recovered.

    If you have already restored windows using the acer utility though it maybe too late as its much more likely the data has been overwritten.

  10. #20
    Join Date
    Jan 2007
    Beans
    Hidden!
    Distro
    Ubuntu Development Release

    Re: Problems dual boot, Help!!

    I'm a very infrequent Windows user and know only the basics of how Windows boots. Normally W7 has a 100MB /boot partition and then a normally-sized main partition. I looks like sda2 was the original W7 boot partition since it is small and contains /bootmgr and /Boot/BCD, which are two critical boot components. What's missing is the /Windows/System32/winload.exe file, although that is only a minor problem.

    The RESULTS.txt seems to indicate that the main Windows partition was overwritten at some point.

    Without the boot info script, I would normally have recommended running chkdsk and then trying the Windows recovery disks to restore the bootloader. However, those efforts would not have recovered the partition if what I think happened is the case.

    Testdisk can look at the disk and sometimes with a deep search come up with recoverable partitions and folders, but it depends greatly on what's been written to the disk in the meantime. It has a companion app called Photorec but I've never used it and it doesn't recover files by filename. I'd probably try a Windows recovery app if you know of one or someone else can provide a recommendation.

    Here is a TestDisk link if you haven't seen it yet:
    http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestD...n_table_status
    Back to Xorg...

    Retired.

Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 123 LastLast

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •