All,
My son came in and said "There's a problem with my computer can you come
look?", so I asked him to tell me what the problem was, to which he replied "No,
come look!"
Suffice it to say it was a grub error complaining about no partition being
found -- huh? How did that happened? Evidently, Counter-strike (Steam) froze
hard in windows requiring a power-off shutdown. The box is dual-boot, so I
booted Linux all is well there. I have run fdsisk, sfdisk, gpart and testdisk to
try and get a picture to what is going on and how to fix it. From memory, the
250G drive should have had:
sda
sda1 Primary/NTFS
sda2 Extended
sda5 swap
sda6 / ext3
sda7 /home ext4
However, it looks like something got inserted at the beginning of the disk (or
something like that) that has thrown the partition number/order information off.
I've never seen anything like it. My questions are: (1) does anybody recognize
what happened?; and (2) what can I do to attempt to recover? (which tool would
be best?)
Here is what the diagnostics show.
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fdisk -l
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Disk /dev/sda: 251.0 GB, 251000193024 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30515 cylinders, total 490234752 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00075d46
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 29 29 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda2 63 315291689 157645813+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 315291690 490223474 87465892+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 315291753 319195484 1951866 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 319195548 368017019 24410736 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 368017083 490223474 61103196 83 Linux
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sfdisk -l
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Disk /dev/sda: 30515 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 0+ 0- 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda2 0+ 19625 19626- 157645813+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 19626 30514 10889 87465892+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
sfdisk: start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,0,1)
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/sda5 19626+ 19868 243- 1951866 82 Linux swap / Solaris
sfdisk: start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
/dev/sda6 19869+ 22907 3039- 24410736 83 Linux
sfdisk: start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
/dev/sda7 22908+ 30514 7607- 61103196 83 Linux
sfdisk: start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,1,1)
-----------
sfdisk -d
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# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors
/dev/sda1 : start= 29, size= 0, Id= 0, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start= 63, size=315291627, Id= 7
/dev/sda3 : start=315291690, size=174931785, Id= f
/dev/sda4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
/dev/sda5 : start=315291753, size= 3903732, Id=82
/dev/sda6 : start=319195548, size= 48821472, Id=83
/dev/sda7 : start=368017083, size=122206392, Id=83
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testdisk /list /dev/sda
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TestDisk 6.13, Data Recovery Utility, November 2011
Christophe GRENIER