Two pretty similar partition structures but WHY one bad? Topic is solved

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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pigtail
Posts: 5
Joined: 29 Nov 2012, 17:55

Two pretty similar partition structures but WHY one bad?

#1 Post by pigtail »

I bought two similar Asus desktop recently so I have two same HD and partitioned into similar structure based on my habit. Yesterday I ruined one of them, then trying to fix it by TestDrive. It's kind of successful but one thing strange after I made a comparison. Below are two screenshots from those two HD. The upper is the recovery from the bad HD. The lower is the health good HD. Actually the structures are almost the same. Now the question is why the TestDrive recovery doesn't allow me to put the structure that way?? Do I miss something?
structure bad
structure bad
bad.jpg (58.23 KiB) Viewed 3151 times
structure ok
structure ok
ok.jpg (53.24 KiB) Viewed 3151 times
Another problem is, now Ubuntu can't recognize the HD after the recovery. The HD was put into a external USB case. GParted did show anything BUT Win7 disk manager displayed correctly as well as seeing every files in every NTFS partition. I thought USB caused the problem so then connected it through SATA. Still Ubuntu "grub" cannot find the file needed for bootup. This is quite interesting. Is there any way to fix it? GParted now is the only program I trust to manage partitions.... :?



PS. I posed another question earlier in http://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/test ... t1600.html. But the problem solved by running TestDrive in root shell prompt under Ubuntu recovery mode. Under that situation, TestDrive didn't freeze the system and Quick Search worked!

pigtail
Posts: 5
Joined: 29 Nov 2012, 17:55

Re: Two pretty similar partition structures but WHY one bad?

#2 Post by pigtail »

My problems now seemed to all solved. Some notes for those who are interested.

1. Partition scanning took forever: it became no problem after moving to the platform under Ubuntu root command shell. At the beginning, Gparted/Ubuntu recognize my HD with hunderds of partitons, as well as TestDrive under that OS. But it shrank to abouth a dozen under root shell. Why I don't download a TestDrive for DOS? 'Cuz I'm so lazy to build a DOS bootup disk, making myself wasting time on the scanning problem. My bad...

2. I still don't understand why the other structure was NOT allowed. TestDrive just didn't allow me to include Linux swap into the extended partition. Why this important? 'cuz I need to re-install Ubuntu and Gparted cannot be working due to TestDrive another bug of extended partition boundary.

3. Digging on google search turned me to try FixParts. No luck when I try to extend the extended partition. After a recovery from TestDrive, Gparted always saw the HD unallocated with a error message saying some boundary thing. everything became smooth when I gave a try on TestDrive 6.14 WIP. 6.14 seems to work better on the boundary of extended partition but why nobody mentioned it on those q&a forums!? I think it was my bad again. I should study those history logs. Ha!

4. ver 6.14 still didn't allow me to include the Linux swap. But now Gparted can recognize the partition arrangement. It was not a big deal then.

I noticed TestDrive has been there for a while. A shame of me for not knowning that. This is a good tool and I really like it.

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