[H-GEN] Partition table recovery

[gavin duley]

On 26 Oct 2010, at 05:04, David Seikel wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Oct 2010 21:30:52 +0100 gavin duley <gavin at microcomaustralia.com.au> wrote:
> 
>> a friend recently managed to apparently kill their hard disc using
>> gparted. It failed to finish writing the new partition table, and now
>> gives the error "invalid partition table". Not sure of what
>> distribution they're using yet, or what other OSes they have on the
>> disc, but will find out soon hopefully.
>> 
>> Is there any way to recover or recreate the partition table without
>> losing all the data on the drive?
> 
> If you have the details of the original partition table, or feel
> confident you can recreate it using obvious values, then you could just
> re partition it once more.  As Stephen said, back up the blocks of the
> hard drive first if there is anything important on it.

Thanks to all for the suggestions so far.

I now have a bit more information about the machine in question (I don't have access to it myself, unfortunately) and it looks like the data on it is not as important as I had thought. So it's not a problem if it's easiest to somehow wipe the whole disk and start again.

'The computer is an old IBM that I was experimenting on. It had Windows ME, but the HDD is now blank. I was using a version of Gparted in Lucid Puppy and before that, Puppy 4. 

'I was originally trying to re-partition the HDD, but ended up with the whole thing being unallocated space. 

'Attempting to format to ext2 (?) fails.

'Rebooting with a boot floppy disc failed, as the error message "invalid or corrupt partition table would keep appearing".'

One option would seem to be to boot a livecd such as Ubuntu and use a program like gpart or fdisk either attempt to recover any existing partitions, or just wipe the whole thing and start again.

> A while ago I had used fdisk to partition the wrong device, but I had
> done fdisk -l to list all partitions on all drives first.  So it was
> simply a matter of restoring the partitions using the information still
> on screen from that list.
> 
> It would be useful to know why gparted failed.  Is the hard drive
> failing anyway?  Backups are useful things.

I'm not certain. It's an old computer, so it could be a failing hard disc. On the other hand, I've always heard that parted was still fairly buggy and so should be used with caution...

thanks,

gavin,

-- 
Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'What kind of tea?'
		-- Neil Gaiman

Gavin Duley
<gavin at microcomaustralia.com.au> <gpd at sdf-eu.org>
WWW: http://www.gavinduley.org/