I managed to corrupt two hard drives in a single day. One had GPT partition table, the other had MBR partitioning. Fortunately, I was able to recover both. This post is about recovering MBR partition table. The post for recovering GPT partition table is here.
My external hard drive got corrupted when I removed the usb wire from my computer, without properly unmounting it. It was an old drive, and had MBR partitioning. My initial reaction was to run fsck, but it didn't help. So, here is how I managed to recover my drive.
Intended audience for this post - You have a hard drive which was initially partitioned with MBR partitioning scheme, and the partition table got corrupted. The hard drive partitions have NTFS installed on them. You are running Linux.
Tools required - testdisk, ntfsfix, gdisk
Installation-
Making sure, you have MBR partitioning on the disk
If the disk is MBR, then continue as follows, else if you have GPT disk, see this.
Recovery procedure
The recovery consists of two parts.
My external hard drive got corrupted when I removed the usb wire from my computer, without properly unmounting it. It was an old drive, and had MBR partitioning. My initial reaction was to run fsck, but it didn't help. So, here is how I managed to recover my drive.
Intended audience for this post - You have a hard drive which was initially partitioned with MBR partitioning scheme, and the partition table got corrupted. The hard drive partitions have NTFS installed on them. You are running Linux.
Tools required - testdisk, ntfsfix, gdisk
Installation-
sudo apt-get install testdisk gdisk
sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g #on some distributions do "sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs" instead
Making sure, you have MBR partitioning on the disk
sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdX
#GPT formatted drive will show the following
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
#MBR formatted drive will show the following
Partition table scan:
MBR: MBR only
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: not present
If the disk is MBR, then continue as follows, else if you have GPT disk, see this.
Recovery procedure
The recovery consists of two parts.
- Recovering partition table.
- Recovering file system(s).
1. Recovering partition table
Run testdisk.
Run testdisk.
sudo testdisk
In testdisk select the disk on which you want to run the recovery. Then select the partitioning scheme, which is "[Intel ] Intel/PC partition" in our case. After that, tell testdisk to search for partitions on the disk, by selecting "[ Analyse ] Analyse current partition structure and search for lost partitions". testdisk will then search the drive for partitions, on selecting "Quick Search". It will now show a list of partitions found. Press "Enter" to continue. If a partition is not listed, try "Deeper Search" in the screen that appears next. When all the partitions that you want to add are shown (i.e. all the partitions that were there before the disk got corrupted), select "Write". testdisk will then write a new partition table to disk, consisting of the found partitions.
Here are the screenshots. Note that these were taken after I recovered my disk, and are for illustrating the steps only. There may be slight variation in what you see.
Once this is complete, you will be able to see partitions of the disk. In my case however, the file system too was corrupt, so I had to recover that as well.
2. Recovering file system(s)
The file system on my disk was ntfs, therefor I had to use ntfsfix, the recovery procedure will differ if you have a different file system. If your disk also had a boot loader, it can be recovered using boot-repair, as explained here.
To recover the ntfs file system, simply run ntfsfix on the corresponding partition of the device (by now you should have recovered the partition table, hence /dev/sdX1, /dev/sdX2, etc. files corresponding to different partitions of the disk should be available, if not, try unplugging the disk, and then plugging it back again).
For example if I had ntfs partition on /dev/sdX1, where /dev/sdX is the disk on which we are attempting recovery. The command will be the following.
Note that there can be several reasons for the file system to get corrupted, and there are several tools and methods for recovery. This post written to describe the problem I faced, and the recovery method that worked for me, with a hope that it will help someone stuck in a similar situation.
All the best !!
Here are the screenshots. Note that these were taken after I recovered my disk, and are for illustrating the steps only. There may be slight variation in what you see.
 |
| options for log creation |
 |
| select disk on which to perform recovery |
 |
| Select partitioning style |
 |
| Select Analyze |
 |
| Search for partitions |
 |
| List of found partitions |
 |
| Write changes to disk |
Once this is complete, you will be able to see partitions of the disk. In my case however, the file system too was corrupt, so I had to recover that as well.
2. Recovering file system(s)
The file system on my disk was ntfs, therefor I had to use ntfsfix, the recovery procedure will differ if you have a different file system. If your disk also had a boot loader, it can be recovered using boot-repair, as explained here.
To recover the ntfs file system, simply run ntfsfix on the corresponding partition of the device (by now you should have recovered the partition table, hence /dev/sdX1, /dev/sdX2, etc. files corresponding to different partitions of the disk should be available, if not, try unplugging the disk, and then plugging it back again).
For example if I had ntfs partition on /dev/sdX1, where /dev/sdX is the disk on which we are attempting recovery. The command will be the following.
sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdX1
Note that there can be several reasons for the file system to get corrupted, and there are several tools and methods for recovery. This post written to describe the problem I faced, and the recovery method that worked for me, with a hope that it will help someone stuck in a similar situation.
All the best !!
