How to recover partitions on ADATA XM11 in ASUS UX31A?

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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Pander
Posts: 3
Joined: 31 Oct 2017, 18:05

How to recover partitions on ADATA XM11 in ASUS UX31A?

#1 Post by Pander »

What is the best way to recover the partition table from an ADATA XM11 256 MB SSD in ASUS ZenBook UX31A with Ubuntu?

https://image.pushauction.com/0/0/f392f ... d9a832.jpg

https://www.asus.com/us/Laptops/ASUS-Ze ... fications/

It had three partitions, ext4 (/), swap and ext4 (/home) which were deleted with gparted. Then the system stopped running. The disk has also out-of-the-box Ubuntu encryption on the home partition and there was nothing left from the original Windows 8 with which it was shipped from the factory. However, the system has UEFI/EFI? probably an LVM and that encrpytion too. Which doesn't make it easier.

In an older version of Ubuntu, I needed to enter a passphrase in the boot process in a screen looking like this: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/wp-content/up ... 00x311.png

In order to avoid any risk, I made copies of the disk using lubuntu live image 17.10 to external hard disks (non-SSD) that were connected via USB:
1)

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dd bs=64K conv=noerror,sync status=progress if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
2)

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ddrescue -f -d -r3 /dev/sda /dev/sdb /root/blah.log
3)

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ddrescue -f -d -r3 --reverse /dev/sda /dev/sdb /root/blahr.log
All encountered some bad sectors, hence the copy with reverse too. All the disks have a larger storage capacity but have been blanked before with dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sdb

I am a bit hesitant to run TestDisk on the original disk itself, at the moment. Therefore, I am running TestDisk on the disk with the copy that was made with ddrescue --reverse ( 3) ) and am running some deep analysis at the moment. The two NTFS partitions on which I am doing deep analysis are 20 GB in size and don't look much like my home partition which I am trying to find. So, I have some questions.

a) Is this approach via copies even possible?
b) If yes, what is the best approach if I would work with a copy? (At the moment I use 3) ) Would it be much easier to run TestDisk on the original disk?
c) Which analysis should I start? "Intel/PC" or "EFI GPT partition map (Mac i386, some x86_64...)"?

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cgrenier
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Re: How to recover partitions on ADATA XM11 in ASUS UX31A?

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Working on a copy created with ddrescue is ok.
Try EFI GPT partition table, it's the most common nowadays.

Pander
Posts: 3
Joined: 31 Oct 2017, 18:05

Re: How to recover partitions on ADATA XM11 in ASUS UX31A?

#3 Post by Pander »

Unfortunately no result. Can anyone recommend some commercial services for partition recovery? Preferably in the Netherlands. Thanks.

Pander
Posts: 3
Joined: 31 Oct 2017, 18:05

Re: How to recover partitions on ADATA XM11 in ASUS UX31A?

#4 Post by Pander »

Reasonably good news. The tool gpack has found the following:

Code: Select all

# gpart -v /dev/sda

dev(/dev/sda) mss(512) chs(31130/255/63)(LBA) #s(500118192) size(244198mb)

* Warning: strange partition table magic 0xA1FF.
Primary partition(1)
   type: 214(0xD6)(UNKNOWN)
   size: 678463mb #s(1389494141) s(896092314-2285586454)
   chs:  (674/158/12)-(660/225/9)d (55779/42/34)-(142271/45/5)r
   hex:  55 9E 8C A2 D6 E1 89 94 9A 48 69 35 7D FF D1 52

Primary partition(2)
   type: 233(0xE9)(UNKNOWN)
   size: 1266068mb #s(2592908364) s(3575802020-6168710383)
   chs:  (72/166/20)-(79/137/20)d (222583/97/15)-(383984/117/53)r
   hex:  14 A6 14 48 E9 89 14 4F A4 68 22 D5 4C A4 8C 9A

Primary partition(3)
   type: 067(0x43)(UNKNOWN)
   size: 282581mb #s(578726163) s(2995862356-3574588518)
   chs:  (90/215/31)-(385/99/26)d (186483/205/47)-(222507/215/19)r
   hex:  FE D7 1F 5A 43 63 5A 81 54 3B 91 B2 13 A9 7E 22

Primary partition(4)
   type: 137(0x89)(UNKNOWN)
   size: 1344077mb #s(2752669971) s(2309245990-5061915960)
   chs:  (710/76/36)-(145/212/52)d (143743/233/17)-(315089/177/25)r
   hex:  35 4C A4 C6 89 D4 34 91 26 4C A4 89 13 69 12 A4


Begin scan...
Anyone here with experience in recovering Ubuntu with LVM and (probably LUKS)?

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