I GOT IT!! So testdisk is the bomb. photorec is part of testdisk and I used that to recover the data the hard way. I then used testdisk and saw that the disk was NTFS and that the partition was still there. The issue appears to have been that the windows installer attempted to install a boot sector and failed. I repaired this boot sector and the drive was mountable and intact.
Since it was a M$ boot sector on the drive, I used two programs to look at and fix the issue. first is ms-sys. http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net/ One can repair a M$ mbr with :~$ sudo ms-sys -m /dev/sda Second: Roger recommended super-fdisk. The same company makes something called PPTD partition table doctor 3.5. I was able to see the same things I saw with testdisk. I was also able to verify that the file structure that was there before repairing the boot sector. There is also an option to fix a boot sector in this program. Contrary to the comment on what I will and will not admit, my first reaction was to call Roger because he has been spending a lot of time the last few months fixing and recovery broken M$ drives. I will leave out jabs that come to mind with the poking at Linux, I am just to damn happy I recovered that data. Thanks roger for taking my late call of distress. Thanks Vandyke and Dino for the recommendations. Chris... On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Roger E. Rustad, Jr <[email protected]> wrote: > Dino K wrote: >> should be pretty simple if it's just the partition itself is messed up. >> >> You can do an fdisk -l and see if it sees what the partitions or sizes >> are. >> >> If it can, you can just relabel the partition in fdisk interactive mode >> as FAT32 or whatever. > > Yeah, I gave him a disk that has UBCD (which includes Super FDisk) on > it, so that's an option also. > > In these cases, I usually just quickly pull the data with a known good > tool before trying the fdisk option. > _______________________________________________ > LinuxUsers mailing list > [email protected] > http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers > -- "As we open our newspapers or watch our television screens, we seem to be continually assaulted by the fruits of Mankind's stupidity." -Roger Penrose
