Hard Disk Partition Woes

[kickstep]

OK So this is a huge stress filled hassle for me.

I have a 80GB SATA running under the nVidia port on my nForce 4 motherboard so it is running natively/emulated or whatever. I bought a new 320gb because I was running out of space. Everything is working fine, the hard drive reports and everything.

I download openSuse 10.2 (x64 DVD) to try it out, I haven't used linux since slackware 10 or 10.1 and thought this looked good. Installed it on the new hard drive (SDA) creating a 2gb swap, 20gp reiserfs (later tested ext3) and the rest ext2/3 for windows compatibility. Installation goes fine until it comes to installing LILO and GRUB. It says lilo is not found (bad DVD?) and grub fails EVERY attempt i make... even on floppy. OK so I just use the installation manager "Other" option to boot to installed OS, takes a little longer with this overhead but OK i figure i can fix it in linux when i have internet. i notice no device is cfdisk -l as * or /boot (i may have command wrong i forget). So i try to * one and that doesn't help. GRUB installer doesnt work. i tell grub to do a recheck since it gives me bios drive issues now. install it and it doesnt work, install it to SDB (80gb) and now windows wont even boot. ok so i noticed mandriva messed up MBR on me and i fixed it with SEAGATE tools CD and repair MBR, no dice but im getting different errors now. i try "fixboot" and "fixmbr" in windows repair on winxp install cd, no success either this usually works. so im getting desperate and i need windows running, so i just reinstall. i delete the 20gb windows partition and reformat it to install. i delete the 60gb partition (with the data i need to recover) on it because it wasnt reporting filesystem right (maybe FAT or RAW or something).

so now im running windows and i need these files. ive tried a few commercial programs to try to recover the partition or recover the files. a couple commercial ones can locate all the files, filestructures/folders/filenames/everything but they cost HEAPS. then i found 2 free ones but they recover files without their names, and something like an mp3 doesnt keep its ID3 tags. test disk6.6 is one example of this. binarybiz virtuallab data recoverer is one example of the commercial ones that does seem to work in adequate functionality. anyone know how i can recover these files/partition? i know the data is there it wasnt afflicted, the programs can detect them and even report me tags. the only thing that was damaged with mbr/parition/partition deleted/ and commands like dd if=mbr.save of=/dev/sdb bs=512 under the linux bash shell

please help!

 

[mechBgon]

I know this is not going to solve your present problem, but in the future, consider keeping the two OSes entirely separate, by unplugging the XP hard drive's data cable before installing Linux on the other drive. That way, each drive will have its own bootloader and they don't tangle. That's how my Vista / XP dual-boot is set up, works great.

Here is a thread with a list of recovery programs, see if this helps at all: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=32&threadid=2037625&enterthread=y

Good luck!

 

[kickstep]

i was thinking that afterwards... and maybe putting them on the silicon image drive so windows may need drivers but i believe linux will represent the disks as hdX instead of sdX (which may help for boot loaders that are poorly setup in installers, i dunno shouldnt truly matter).

well i think it was pretty messed up, tried a few more programs just gave up and formatted it... just gonna have to get the music again and grit and bear for the loss of everything else.

thanks