[ubuntu-in] Need Help - Disaster during some fiddling with partitioning tool -(SOLVED)

[Ramnarayan.K]

Hi

A few days back i had posted a mail regarding some trouble i had with
my Hard Disk. Luckliy i managed to resolve the problem. Below my
original text (part snipped) is how it happened

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 9:37 PM, Ramnarayan. K <ramnarayan.k at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> Need some help
>
> I was looking at my On Board Hard disk (80 GB) and there was a
> partition that was lying unused and i wanted to reformat it to VFAT.
> For some reason gparted did not allow me to do anything, so very
> *stupidly* i checked the change disklabel option and said yes to msdos
> disklabel.
>
> Needless to say it blew all my partitions away and said that it has
> reformatted my disk (within a few seconds)
>
> So right now there is just one grey blob that show up as an
> unformatted disk /dev/sda about 75 Gigs.
>

First Booted of a Live Ubuntu 7.04 CD,
Connected to the internet to google / mail for help
and installed testdisk ( i also had it on a local repository which i used)

Ran testdisk on my Laptop HD and after the preliminary search asked
testdisk to run a deeper search

It found all my existing partitions
NTFS - win os
VFAT - win recovery
VFAT - data
swap,
/boot
/home
/(root)

then asked testdisk to write the data to MBR

for some reason i had to run this process twice since the first time
testdisk did nothing.

At the end of the this testdisk operation i rebooted with live CD and
it had recovered only the /home and the vfat - data partition (which
was 99 % of my work)  1 % was on my NTFS section and that was non
critical.

So backed up my data using rsync (which i normally run once a fortnight)

So since my data was recovered - i used the Windows Recovery CD's to
try and recover the win section

and what did Windows recovery do - stupid that it is- wiped my whole
hard disk, reformatted the whole HD into two partitions WIN OS - nfts
and WIn recovery. But atleast i got back my original Win OS and they
can't get after me for piracy.

Next rebooted into LIve Ubuntu 7.04 and repartitioned appropriately
with WIN OS
Win Recovery
VFAT - data
/boot
swap
/(root)
/home
and went ahead with the install and redid all my configurations from my back up.
And Voila in a very short time (few hours totally i.e.)am up and running.

The longest time was spent by windows about 2 hours , and it took me
about another 2 hours (about 1 for recovery of data about 1 to setup
up and personalize ubuntu)

***
So learnings
1. Back up very often
2. Unless you want to cause your self heartburn don't attempt to
change the disklabel
3. If you are dual booting make sure you have your recovery CD's for windows
4. Make sure you  have a list of all your preferred apps and
configuration files so that if you redo your system you just need to
copy them back. (or have a local repository
5. Have a Live CD Handy (and if you can't get internet running on a
live session) then make sureyou have Knoppix which (i guess) will have
it built in.
6. Don't Panic Linux does save lives :-)

regards
ram