Today I tried to install Ubuntu Linux. Usually I don't have any problems installing Linux, going back a few years. But today I had close to a nightmare. You could also say I perhaps had a premonition as well. As I was restarting the computer, I wondered if I should back up stuff. I thought to myself that if I lost anything, it would mean I wasn't meant to have it anyway.
So I restarted and put in the disk. Installation was hohum, normal blue screen Linux. Pretty much selected defaults. Came to the partitioning part and was surprised as the first two options were to delete completely Disk1 or Disk2. Quickly went away from that and selected the part about using the largest free space. Went through the set up and choose to let it do it itself. I didn't like the default filesystem and choose ReiserFS. It also asked me where to put to boot stuff, grub I think. I choose to put it on Disk2, the same as the Linux. I did this because I know in my bios I can select to boot from the second disk. Everything else seemed to be ok. The rest of the installation went smooth. It completed and told me to restart. Note that under the installation partition manager, everything was listed as correct.
So I rebooted and decided to try windows just to be safe. It booted up and all just fine. I checked the d drive and to my surprise I could not access it as it was unavailable. I went to manage My Computer, and to my surprise it was all unallocated. So I quickly restarted and booted with what I believe to be the Ultimate Boot Disk for CD-roms. I used the Free Fdisk to see what was happening. It listed the NTFS partition as being a FAT16 format. It also listed the Linux partitions separately but as unknowns. I thought about trying to change to type to NTFS, but decided to leave it alone and try to see if I could access the drive in Ubuntu. So I tried to boot into it. I got to grub, but then it gave an error. Tried it again to no avail.
So I boot back into Windows 2000 and search the internet for things to do to fix it. It actually is hard to find information on fixing the master boot record of the second disk. But I searched google for "fix mbr." I assumed that the mbr had been destroyed because of the allocations being correct in the Free Fdisk. I was starting to worry so I checked snapfiles for data recovery and downloaded pci filerecovery(freeware) and Recover My Files(shareware.) Since there were several failure reviews on the free one, I first tried the Shareware to see if there were any recoverable files. It would show me, but I could not fix anything with that program. It scanned and started showing files that were still there. Since it appeared that it would take hours to finish the scan, I canceled and searched for other fixes. I noticed somewhere that someone had suggested to boot into the recovery console and type: "fixboot", "fixmbr", "chkdsk /f c:". It was also recommended to try the Trinity Rescue Disk,which I decided to save for last. Since the original poster had success with the console recover option, I decided to try that but was not satisfied with the options since I was trying to figure out what to do for the second disk. I came upon a wonderful site, www.computerhope.com. It listed syntax and usage. Great site there. Got the information I needed and decided to try it. Booted in and tried it. It seemed to work. I didn't chkdsk /f though because from experience I know that often microsft fixing tools do more harm than good. That might explain why there is such a large database of manually fixing problems supplied by Microsoft.
So I rebooted and things still didn't work. Now I was getting panicky and decided after reading about making an exact sized partition, that I would try it. Unfortunately, I recall windows as listing the free space as being 10.81GB. For some reason I wrote that down before the horror. It turns out it is useless because of the inconsistent measuring of bytes and cluster sizes. But I tried to get into Ranish Partition Manager and 'remake' the partition. Unfortunately it gave me a big error about everything being screwed up. I think at this point I almost deleted it all and restarted, but I did not. I went back to the UBD and saw a couple of partition fixing programs and thought it would not hurt to try. So I tried one and was lost immediately. It looked like the old Norton Commander for Dos. It did not find any files on D: anyway. Tried the other one, TestDisk 5.0. And it seemed to have promise but didn't quite work.
So I decided to delete everything and went back into Free Fdisk but had another thought, I could delete one overlapping partition and resize the other. I deleted it and went back to Ranish, but got the same red error again. I went to the other computer to search for some other options and decided to read up on Ranish Partition Manager to see if I was doing things right. On the user group page, someone had a similar problem to me and someone else told him to try TestDisk. I read up on TestDisk some more and noticed that the new version is TestDisk 5.8 and worked in windows. I decided to give it another try.
So I downloaded it and extracted it and tried it out. It scanned and actually found immediately my NTFS partition but kept scanning and also found the overlapping Linux partition. I choose not to fix that and leave the windows partition as is and write it to the mbr. I rebooted and found my D: drive intact and still with the name I gave it.
Great, but what about the overwrite? I suspect no files were actually written over, but it could have been about a third of them. I ran WinDirStat to see how things looked and check out some files. Everything seems to be in order. I guess I'll find out if things have been written over in the days, weeks, and months to come. I plan to donate some paypal funds to the author of TestDisk to show my appreciation. If I would have used Recover My Files, it would have cost me $70 and been insufficient in the method. I'm very grateful!
I believe this was a two part error. Somehow, the mbr on my /dev/hdb was messed up and the NTFS partition labeled as FAT16. Then I believe I really messed things up with the Windows 2000 recovery console attempt to cause the misallocation of sizes.
Am I turned off to Linux from this experience? No I still want to try out Ubuntu, as it looks like maybe the distro I was looking for. I just have to be more careful about the installation and I think I still dislike dual booting. I am glad I didn't mess with my primary disk. Looking at the Ubuntu forums, it seems it might have troubles installing to /dev/hdb as a second partition.
I think I should either buy a new motherboard and ram so I can have two computers or get the swappable drive cages since I have another hard drive not being used. That was the plan anyway. My 160GB was supposed to hold entertainment media and be accessible from Linux and Windows and I was actually going to swap out drives. I haven't gotten around to it yet. But I did have about 50GB's of my unbacked up ripped cd's and digital photos on there. Whew.
Links for this article:
http://www.computerhope.com/
http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html
http://www.ranish.com/part/
http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/
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