Nothing like a little pressure to get you going in the morning. I came in to work today to find out someone had started an Affymetrix experiment but the analysis software would not start. About 2 hours were left before the experiment had to be run or it would risk the quality of the experiment and then would have to be repeated.
The problem... The 2nd hard drive which contained the analysis software was not being recognized by Windows. In comes Kubuntu live CD. Turns out the partition table was empty. I ran
smartmontools to make sure the drive was still alive and it was. I tried running
gpart to have it guess what the partition table should be and had it write a new partition table. Upon rebooting into windows the D: drive was visiable in My Computer, but it wanted to reformat it when I double clicked on it. Nice of windows to offer to reformat my drive isn't it? Oh right, it has data on it that I want. Reboot back into Kubuntu... mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt... Hey, what do you know, all the files are still there. Kubuntu reading NTFS drive and Windows won't... How ironic?
Any way, time was running out for the experiment, I knew the data still existed on the D: since Linux could read the data now... The thought came to my mind, maybe the partition table is wrong? So, I stumbled upon testdisk... testdisk /dev/sdb
y done. I rebooted and Windows now could read and write from the D: drive again.
Purpose of this post: To remind myself and others to try testdisk when trying to fix a corrupted partition table. (Debian/Ubuntu(Universe): testdisk package)Labels: hard drives, parition table, system adminstration
