Re: Recovery of partition
Posted: 17 Oct 2012, 10:23
It seems that you now have testdisk running under Windows 7 (the 80 GB drive?) and your 500 GB drive is now external .. so you've made some progress.
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(/dev/sda)=80026361856 (80GB)
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(/dev/sdb)=500107862016 (500GB)
It is easy to be wise after the event but having experienced several incidents with damaged disks I now keep a number of pre-burned CD's at hand to assist in recovery.
If you install unetbootin on windows 7 (there is a linux version) you can quickly burn different rescue disks to CD or USB to help in recovery.
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
It sounds like you need boot recovery.
http://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair-cd/home/Home/
Can you burn this onto a CD or USB flash and try to recover your boot.
Fiona should give more insights into the testdisk.log you posted.
If you still can't recover you might try installing this commercial program ..
http://www.stellarinfo.com/linux-data-recovery.htm
on windows 7 to then analyse (not recover) your external 500 GB drive (you don't need to purchase at this stage - only try it out).
If you can see your ext4 file structure then this shows that they are not lost and you can continue learning how to apply (free) testdisk.
Also look at this for partition recovery (although you can use testdisk for partition recovery).
http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/
Sometimes it is more cost effective to purchase recovery tools if you are really stuck.
Re: the question on prompts to check disk .. I would let any checks run through to completion (which might take some time). Don't interrupt the tests.
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(/dev/sda)=80026361856 (80GB)
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(/dev/sdb)=500107862016 (500GB)
It is easy to be wise after the event but having experienced several incidents with damaged disks I now keep a number of pre-burned CD's at hand to assist in recovery.
If you install unetbootin on windows 7 (there is a linux version) you can quickly burn different rescue disks to CD or USB to help in recovery.
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
It sounds like you need boot recovery.
http://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair-cd/home/Home/
Can you burn this onto a CD or USB flash and try to recover your boot.
Fiona should give more insights into the testdisk.log you posted.
If you still can't recover you might try installing this commercial program ..
http://www.stellarinfo.com/linux-data-recovery.htm
on windows 7 to then analyse (not recover) your external 500 GB drive (you don't need to purchase at this stage - only try it out).
If you can see your ext4 file structure then this shows that they are not lost and you can continue learning how to apply (free) testdisk.
Also look at this for partition recovery (although you can use testdisk for partition recovery).
http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/
Sometimes it is more cost effective to purchase recovery tools if you are really stuck.
Re: the question on prompts to check disk .. I would let any checks run through to completion (which might take some time). Don't interrupt the tests.