boot error: failed to find boot disk

[bch012001]

Hello all, I had a a problem booting last night when my laptop battery came loose and caused a crash during boot. It ceased loading a daemon and I turned it off with the power switch,
then I received the boot error,
then i checked the \linux\drives directory and it was corrupt,

I then, out of ignorance, ran wubi from within windows XP and said unistall believing that it would reinstall and fix itself
Thus you can see my green behavior

I have been searching the threads and have tried many things but have had no success, I will suffer a great loss if I lose that load of Ubuntu as I have allot of work stored there, and in my Thunderbird accounts

I found a thread that had a script called boot_info_script055.sh and ran it, here are the results:
Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010

============================= Boot Info Summary: ==============================

=> Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda

sda1: __________________________________________________ _______________________

File system: ntfs
Boot sector type: Windows XP
Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block.
Operating System: Windows XP
Boot files/dirs: /boot.ini /ntldr /NTDETECT.COM

=========================== Drive/Partition Info: =============================

Drive: sda ___________________ __________________________________________________ ___

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 41345 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Partition Boot Start End Size Id System

/dev/sda1 * 63 625,136,399 625,136,337 7 HPFS/NTFS


blkid -c /dev/null: __________________________________________________ __________

Device UUID TYPE LABEL

/dev/loop0 squashfs
/dev/sda1 7C6C2FDE6C2F91C6 ntfs
/dev/sda: PTTYPE="dos"

============================ "mount | grep ^/dev output: ===========================

Device Mount_Point Type Options

aufs / aufs (rw)
/dev/sr0 /cdrom iso9660 (ro,noatime)
/dev/loop0 /rofs squashfs (ro,noatime)
/dev/sda1 /media/7C6C2FDE6C2F91C6 fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096,default_ permissions)


================================ sda1/boot.ini: ================================

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=C:\wubildr.mbr
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect


Any help that anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You

[oldfred]

It shows no sign of wubi other than the entry still in windows boot.ini.

Do not use windows but only the liveCDs. If no activity has occurred it may be possible to recover the file.

I believe testdisk also works on NTFS partitions, but wubi is really only a file root.disk on the windows NTFS partition. Not sure how that is then handled as it may have to recovery then entire file to be able to recover anything inside it.

enable the "universe" repository to download testdisk
System>Administration>Software Sources>Ubuntu Software.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
repairs including testdisk info & links
http://members.iinet.net.au/~herman546/p21.html (http://members.iinet.net.au/%7Eherman546/p21.html)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery#Lost%20Partition
Testdisk & photorec
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntucat/recoverdeletedfiles/
Foremost
http://www.howtoforge.com/recover-deleted-files-with-foremost
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/recover-deleted-files-with-foremostscalpel-in-ubuntu.html

Instructions
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Menu_Analyse
sleuthkit is in repositories:
http://www.sleuthkit.org/sleuthkit/.


Of course you have backups and wubi is not intended as a long term use of Ubuntu. From the creator of Wubi:
http://howsoftwareisbuilt.com/2009/03/12/interview-with-agostino-russo-wubi-ubuntu/
Agostino: Wubi actually wasn’t designed to do long-term installations. The main aim was really to let people try out Ubuntu with confidence. Normally, users that start with Wubi tend to upgrade to a full installation to a dedicated partition at the next release cycle.

[bcbc]

+1 to what Oldfred said.

When you uninstalled it deleted the root.disk file (this is the one you need to recover). It may be possible to recover it using recovery software such as testdisk - that is your only hope. Don't use the hard drive at all or there is a risk it will be overwritten.

[bch012001]

Gentle-people: Thank you for your quick response. I have been through parts of oldfred's advice
thusfar I have:
installed testdisk
then did a deep search which turned up
a deleted record for my linux (drive?), a little fuzzy on whether or not it should be restored as a bootable primary or not

Then I marked it "*" and attempted a write
It tried to boot but failed
ran testdisk again and this time set it to "P"
ran live cd and tried to mount the 18gig drive that now appears but it says:

Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

Also, I cannot boot the XP system that was running prior to my testdisk attempts

I can see two deleted partitions in test disk one is hpfs- ntfs (green) an the other is linux

Do I have any hope of recovery?
Unfortunately I have been moving from Detroit to Wisconsin and my backup is a little older than usual as well as the density of work these past weeks...

Still working, but any further input would be appreciated

[bcbc]

Gentle-people: Thank you for your quick response. I have been through parts of oldfred's advice
thusfar I have:
installed testdisk
then did a deep search which turned up
a deleted record for my linux (drive?), a little fuzzy on whether or not it should be restored as a bootable primary or not

Then I marked it "*" and attempted a write
It tried to boot but failed
ran testdisk again and this time set it to "P"
ran live cd and tried to mount the 18gig drive that now appears but it says:

Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

Also, I cannot boot the XP system that was running prior to my testdisk attempts

I can see two deleted partitions in test disk one is hpfs- ntfs (green) an the other is linux

Do I have any hope of recovery?
Unfortunately I have been moving from Detroit to Wisconsin and my backup is a little older than usual as well as the density of work these past weeks...

Still working, but any further input would be appreciated

I thought you were looking for a deleted file: root.disk (the wubi virtual disk). Restoring a deleted partition implies you had a real direct install, which is not the case from my understanding of what you stated in your first post.

That's why xp won't boot. You need to try and recover the ntfs partition. Please be careful - ask if you're not sure.

[bch012001]

Yes, I guess I valued expedience over accuracy, which was rather ignorant of me.
Yes, I believe that I had a wubi installation which makes sense now, as I do not need to restore a partition.

Thus, I am to use testdisk to recover a file not an old attempt at installing linux?

Thanks for your help and patience.

[bcbc]

Yes, I guess I valued expedience over accuracy, which was rather ignorant of me.
Yes, I believe that I had a wubi installation which makes sense now, as I do not need to restore a partition.

Thus, I am to use testdisk to recover a file not an old attempt at installing linux?

Thanks for your help and patience.

Don't be hard on yourself... this stuff can be a little overwhelming, especially when you're thinking about important data that is lost.

Try this recovery example showing how to undelete files from an ntfs partition: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk:_undelete_file_for_NTFS

NOTE: I assume you've already used testdisk to change your partition back to ntfs.

[bch012001]

bcbc: Yes, that was my edit, thus you assume correctly.

[bch012001]

Fixed, the tools posted here are excellent and many thanks to you both. bcbc, i really appreciated the clarifications and replies, they helped guide me to resolution.