On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 11:56 AM, John Williams <[email protected]> wrote:
> I gave this disk to my son to use as a backup. It had a Linux distro on it > but that was removed, or so we thought. (He formatted the disk with Win2000 > "format") For some time my son says he could access the disc and he put all > his data files on this disk! > Now he cannot access them. > This is what I find using fdisk: > > [r...@localhost blue]# fdisk -l /dev/sda > > Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes > 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders > Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes > Disk identifier: 0xabea72d4 > > Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System > /dev/sda1 * 2089 4191 16881607 83 Linux > /dev/sda2 2102 13907 94821242 7 HPFS/NTFS > /dev/sda3 2089 4178 16777472 0 Empty > Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary. > /dev/sda4 2089 4178 16777472 0 Empty > Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary. > You're going to have fun with that. according to my understanding, you have 2 partitions ( at least ) sharing disk space. [ Linux ] ---[ HPFS/NTFS ---------------------------------] I can't recall what caused the last time I saw something like this happen, but I once had a win98 install where this occurred. [ Fat32 --------] --------------[ linux --------- ] And it would temporarily work for things, and just randomly, windows would erase the bits that coincided with the linux partition and cease it from working. The only legitimate situation for this behaviour is extended partitions, ie: [ Linux ][ -Extended- --------------------------][ Whatever ] -------------[ Part ----][-Part-------][---Part ----] So good luck with that. You might want to DD a copy of each logical partition somewhere before proceeding, because to me, it appears you have a logically corrupt drive layout. Even then, your chances of recovering seem slim to me. Also, note: any attempt to mount these drives in their current state, to me would seem risky, and prone to exacerbate this problem. -- Kent
