PDA

View Full Version : [all variants] Accidentally erased partitions from external USB drive



kah-el
July 27th, 2008, 09:10 PM
Hi,

Just installed Ubuntu Studio from CD to internal harddrive, dual-boot with WinXP. Everything fine, except that during installation I failed to notice that my external USB drive was connected, and accidentally first removed the partitions (I think there was only one) and I guess also the MBR too from the drive ("Are you absolutely sure...", "Of course I'm sure...") :oops:.

The external drive is Seagate Free Agent, and I don't think it needs to be bootable (I just use it for data storage), but just now my system (either XP or Ubuntu) cannot read any data from it.

Before any experiments of my own with fdisk, I'd like to get some hints for how to best solve the situation.

> sudo fdisk -l outputs following info:

Disk /dev/sda: 163.9 GB, 163928604672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19929 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7a6a67de

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4256 34186288+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 4257 19929 125893372+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 4257 19741 124383231 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 19742 19929 1510078+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa4b57300

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

Help greatly appreciated.

--
Mikael

Pumalite
July 27th, 2008, 09:19 PM
Get Gparted Live CD and see if you can recover your external drive:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=271779
Burn the iso to disk and boot from it.