[aklug] testdisk and hosed grub

From: WH Bouterse <bill@bouterse.com>
Date: Tue Dec 28 2010 - 11:09:45 AKST

A recent foul-up with Dual boot Lenovo 560 M$7 and Mint10
Adding another rpm distro and paying no attention I hosed grub.
Running gparted from live disk saw no partitions and df from terminal the same yet file manager saw M$ but not Linux
Trying Puppy and Mandriva based live systems saw the ntfs but not the linux ext4 and xfs

some research saw a reoccuring gparted bug concerning this problem.
a nifty utility which I had not heard of before "testdisk" available now from deb/ubuntu repository
eventually helped solve the problem in combo with a live disk. (using the distro live disk of the installed linux system)

From the very start "testdisk" after 'Analyze' saw the partitions in question
using the testdisk restore grub/mbr option got the M$ recognized at boot but still no Linux
After much trial and error using the utility and figuring which combo to use
1)Analyze
2)Highlight and restore the appropriate partitions
3)Quit and reboot into Live Disk (now for some reason it can see the partitions)
4)Mount appropriate partition and run the usual restore grub commands for (in my case) /dev/sda

Of course this all took several hours and a couple days.

I find it interesting that gparted has had this known problem for several years and
one lone programmer has for several years a program out that can "see what others cannot"

A great little utility...

Have others encountered this snafu and resolved it differently?

WHB
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Received on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 15:09:45 -0500 (EST)

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