[colug-432] testdisk is a lifesaver!

[Richard Hornsby]

On Jan 26, 2014, at 21:55 , Steve Roggenkamp <roggenkamps at acm.org> wrote:

> Thanks for this.  This sounds like a great program to have in your back pocket for situations like this.  Glad to hear it recovered your original partitions.

You may take a look at gparted. 

http://gparted.org

It is basically Partition Magic for linux.  It is graphical, which I'm usually not a fan of in Linux but it definitely helps here to be able see everything, and has been a solid tool for me to accomplishing the type of task you're trying.  There are also bootable gparted LiveCDs available.




> Steve
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 10:46 PM, Joshua Kramer <joskra42.list at gmail.com> wrote:
> So I finally got around to putting an SSD in my laptop.  This meant that I now have a 640GB hard disk that I could put into an external enclosure, so I did so.
> 
> But alas, the partitioning on this 640GB drive was inconvenient.  It had a 500MB boot partition, a 550GB /home partition, and 85GB / partition.  I wanted to be able to use most of the 650GB as one contiguous filesystem.  So, I deleted the third (85GB) partition and did the simple fdisk trick of deleting the second partiton and then re-creating it with the same beginning cylinder and a different ending cylinder.  I did this and wrote the partition table to disk.
> 
> Strangely, it wasn't automounting.  I then tried to mount /dev/sdb2 and it gave me the dreaded "You must specify filesystem type" message.  Drat!  I tried to re-create the exact structure as before via fdisk, but that didn't work either.  The problem was that the boundaries between partition 1 and partition 2 were not on cylinder boundaries... so instead of beginning on sector 26, it began on sector 25.5.
> 
> Not sure how to get out of this, I did some Google-FU and found a program called testdisk.  Supposedly, this would re-create your partition table for you.  And indeed it did!  I deleted all of the partitions via fdisk.  Testdisk scanned the entire disk and re-created the original partition table, and all three partitions magically re-appeared.
> 
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