[Junebug]

I seem to have corrupted my partition table on my hard drive. I had decided to install Ubuntu 6.10 as a dual boot on an existing Windows XP system. I did the same thing to another machine two weeks ago successfully.

The hard drive is a 120Gig Maxtor. All 120 Gigs was allocated as an NTFS drive. So first, in Windows I defragmented the drive. Good so far.

Then I booted a live version of Ubuntu 6.10. Everything is great. I load Gparted and resize the NTFS to 39 Gigs. Everything is great. I then add a FAT 32 partition of 39 Gigs, and a Linux ext3 Partition of 38Gis, leaving 995 megs which I allocated as a Linux Swap file.

So I tell Gparted to go ahead and partition this drive. It chugs away for a few minutes, then tells me part 1 of 4 is done. In a couple more minutes, it shows 3 of 4 parts done (just the swap left). It chugs along and then says it had errors partitioning the swap drive. It then starts looking at the drive again and suddenly come up and shows the entire drive as unallocated. And now, it will not let me add any partitions.

I closed Ubuntu and tried to boot Windows...dead...no hard drive found. I load Knoppix. I try QTparted...same deal.

I read on the forum about TestDisk. I load it into Knoppix. It runs and says it can’t read the partition table. But when it analyzes it finds my three partitions (NTFS, Fat32 and Linux). But it either tells me the fat32 and the Linux should be 16 sectors, or tells me the NTFS should be 255 (depending on which I have selected).

I try writing a new partition table but it comes up with a error that it can’t write the partition table. I tried deleting the old partition table...no go.

TestDisk can see the files in the NTFS partition so they are still there, it’s just the partition table that is scrambled.

Two things.
First, I would like to get the data back although I could probably recreate what’s there.

Second, how can I get this hard drive to come back to life and be useful again? A low level formatting?

Thanks for your help...

[MRD]

Did you write down your partition table? You can always recreate it using fdisk manually.

You might also try gpart (not gparted...), which is a tool for guessing the places your partition table begins and ends. I've used it to successfully guess partition tables when I've accidentally deleted them without deleting the partitions themselves.

This is dangerous stuff though, proceed at your own risk.

[Junebug]

fdisk is unable to read the disk. I also tried Maxtor diagnostic software...it also can't seem to read the disk. I guess I may try and copy the data off but otherwise I guess I am just going to have to reformat it.

[MRD]

Try to use gpart to guess the partition boundaries, then try to write them. This worked form me once when I deleted my partition tables entirely.

However, if the filesystem itself is no longer intact, you're kind of screwed and I doubt you'll get anything out of it.

[Junebug]

Disktest could read where the partitions were, but nothing I tried was able to write to the partition table (fdisk included). I ultimately was forced to "dd" the whole disk. I now have it back up and running (dual boot XP with Ubuntu).

Thanks for all your suggestions...

Junebug

[hitbyaprkedcar7]

I did the same thing to my raptor. I gave up on it and used another one for now