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Gosh, I just got involved in another disk disaster. Not mine this time ... a friends. His computer wouldn't boot. I booted it using a Linux Live-CD like I mentioned above. After a bit of snooping, I determined that he had no partition table on his HDD. What?! Me running into TWO partition table disasters in two weeks? That is completely unheard of! Yet here I was, staring at his useless disk. At least I know what happened to my partition table - I had deleted it myself like and idiot. His partition table, who knows what happened to it.
Well, at least I had recently refreshed my brains memory of how to use testdisk, so off I went. Testdisk was able to recreate a partition table based on what it found scanning the disk. Great! The exact outcome I was hoping for. After checking and re-checking I was doing what I wanted to be doing, I told testdisk to write my re-created partition table to my friends disk. "Write failure!" Oh no. His disk was on a death spiral down the toilet. Must be a bad sector where the partition table needs to go. Probably why it went AWOL in the first place, and why I couldn't re-write it using testdisk. Unfortunately my friends disk is old and uses MBR rather than GPT partitioning, so I couldn't make use of the multiple redundant copies of the partition table that GPT uses. MBR only has one copy.
Bummer.
But I was able to have testdisk use it's re-created partition table (in memory) as if it were the actual partition table on the disk, so I could see all my friends files. I was able to grab his files and get them copied over to a different disk. I breathed a sigh of relief after this. So did my friend, since he didn't have any backups. I'll bet he will going forward though!
Now that the files are safe on a different disk, I'm going to go do some playing around with his one-foot-in-the-grave disk. When you get one of these things that is now disposable you have the perfect opportunity to play with, test out, and fine tune your disk recovery skills. For one, I'm going to see if I can use the testdisk re-created MBR partition table and convert the disk to use GPT partitioning. I want to explore if that will allow me to place the GPT partition table in a differnt place on the disk - not the part with the (assumed) bad sectors. The primary MBR partition table has to go in one specific place on the disk - I think (emphasis on *think*) you have more leeway with GPT partition tables since there are several redundant copies of those on a GPT partitioned disk. Anyway, I don't really know, but with this newly available "disposable disk" I have a playground to test various recovery techniques out on.
Geez - two partition table disasters in two weeks! Who would have ever thought that could happen???!!! I have moved from vaguely remembering a program named "testdisk" into a "testdisk guru" in a very short time. I shouldn't say I'm all the way to guru status with it, but I'm a heckuva lot more knowledgeable about its capabilities and use than I was a few short weeks ago.
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