Install killed my partitions-a tale of everything gone wrong

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Forestarius
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Install killed my partitions-a tale of everything gone wrong

Post by Forestarius »

I was doing fine with Celena but wanted a little better networking. I logged in as root so I could edit the Samba configuration better. I logged off as root, logged on as user and everything seemed okay. On the next reboot things went wrong.

I don't remember all the error messages, but suffice it to say the file system was toast. I booted up on the Mint live/install disk to try to fix the Samba config file in case that was the problem, but it was gone, along with most of the filesystem directorys. The partitions look all fine and /home was untouched so all was okay. Then I clicked install to reinstall the OS.

When it rebooted the DVD died. It spins, other OS's says it's there, IDs it and all, but it is not able to read any disk. I have a removable hard drive system so it's easy to pop in another HD to check such things.

Well, I can order a new DVD drive, but didn't want to live without Mint while I was waiting for it. So I put the HD in another older computer and booted up the Mint CD live/install disk and then began the install. Everything looked fine.

Then came the first boot where it stalled. Somehow the HD now had two partitons, /boot and the rest of an unformated HD. Somehow all the other partitions were killed during the install process. Even /home is gone now :cry:
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
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Husse

Post by Husse »

This is a sad story Forestarius
There is not much we can do for you now :cry:
There are tools for data recovery that can be run from a cd
The DEFT (a special Linux distro http://deft.yourside.it/ )
and the UBCD are examples
Check first again from the live CD.....
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clem
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Post by clem »

Oh man... when things go wrong ...

About root logins: Avoid graphical root logins. If you need to be root, be root in a console or in a terminal ("sudo su -" with your password, or "su -" with the root password). I don't know if it's related to your initial problem but it can definitely do some harm.
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Forestarius
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Post by Forestarius »

It's not really that bad. Losing /home took away all my settings and email, but it was more of a practice system for learning more about Linux and my own enjoyment. Before upgrading to 3.1 a couple of weeks ago, I did a backup of my data onto another hard drive that's in the first computer because I originally did not have the /home partition, instead using the whole HD as one big partition by default. So I didn't lose very much and not anything I can't live without.

Tonight I put an old CD drive from 2001 in the computer to replace the bad DVD drive for now, then installed Cassandra into eight nice partitions. It's nice to have my emerald theme world back. :P

I haven't done any of the updates to it and will probably keep it this way for a while because I can now once again use the brightness adjustment in the Movie Player. It might seem minor, but the bug in the new version that deactivates those controls means my videos are too dark to view. I'm not sure when the bug kicked in, whether later in Cassandra or Celena, but it sure hurts the view.

It's nice to be back :D
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