Hi all I have gone to new heights with my Linux trashing! I am absolutly stunned beyond words..... Testing away, I installed Kubuntu Hardy Heron on a laptop. All went really well, installation, setting up wireless, multimedia, you name it. On and off, I worked on this installation for roughly two to three hours. Then I decided to restart the laptop. On boot I got the message - "This is not a bootable disk..... yadi yadi ya" WTF? I already restarted the laptop once after installation. I was working on the bloody thing for ages! OK, no sweat, I will rescue the system using the almighty 'rescue a broken system' option. CD in, go through the motion - Stage Fail!!! Cannot go into rescue mode. WTF????? OK, so lets pretend I am starting again. I will just re-install the base system. All my settings are already on my /home partition... CD in, go through the motion, get to the partitioner - NOTHING ON THE DISK!!!!!! THE DISK IS WIPED CLEAN!!!!! There is not a :swear: thing on the :swear: disk!!!!! 40GB of virgin, unadulterated, disk space!!!! Tell me you have seen anything like this before!!!!!! Common! Crown me the KING!!!!!! :doh:
Definitely never seen that before. If it makes you feel any better though, *ubuntu won't even boot on my laptop, let alone install. Debian works fine though. Not that I'm complaining...
yep, saba, being there done that, but, still no bl00dy t-shirt what you need is the Gparted LiveCD use testdisk on the CD to restore your data, it would also be a good idea to set the disk label (to destroy any corruption) after restoring data & backing it up Edit: i think you have a corrupt partition table Edit: the same thing happened to me, but, i personally chose to DBAN the HDD, so, nothing could survive obviously after restoring & backing up
Sounds like your partition table's been destroyed. Most likely all your data is there but a corrupt partition table renders the whole disk useless unless you have a backup.
Right, not giving up and having funny dreams all night, I traced my steps and then remembered that after transferring some files to the installtion from a USB disk I wanted to format the USB drive. As I am so lazy I was looking for a program which will do this for me (rather than typing a very short sentence.... :doh and found Kmformat. No, never heard of it before.... so I installed and as I could not find an entry in the KMenu, I tried to launch it from the shell - $kmformat /dev/sda to see what would happen. As you probably spotted (good children...) sda is not exactly the right dev to call when you are using SCSI laptop HDD. It should have been be sdb! But in my defence the shell did return a 'command not found'. My only quam with Kubuntu is that if the partition table got corrupted during my work I should have known about it, right? If not, when the hell could this have ahppened? I am not giving up and tonight Kubuntu WILL be installed and IT WILL :swear: WORK!!! Thanks guys, I do feel a bit better....I thought it was a very articulated rant! :chk:
In my experience partition recovery programs are hit and miss at best. Standard undelete programs wont work since it the partition doesn't actually exist anymore. It's just looking at unformatted space. saba: I don't see what could have happened if you're definitely sure the shell didn't find the program. If it did and it formatted the drive, then only the program can notify you, not Kubuntu itself since it's just a distribution. Good luck with it.
you said yourself true, as all my partition were not restored, but, it's still worth trying BTW: strangely enough i was using hardy yeah, good luck saba keep telling yourself that, you never know, you may convince yourself
Cool, installation done and all seem to be going OK. Luckily there was nothing worth saving so no harm done.... Thanks all for your interest.... and support.
