[H-GEN] Partition table recovery

David Seikel onefang at gmail.com
Tue Oct 26 16:17:44 EDT 2010


On Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:08:08 +0100 gavin duley
<gavin at microcomaustralia.com.au> wrote:

> 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.

Boot from a live CD, Use dd to at least wipe out the first few blocks,
then fdisk to create new partitions.

> > 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...

I generally use fdisk, but it's not very user friendly.  I don't need
user friendly.  Always been reliable for me, barring the odd brain fart
on my part as described above.
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