SOLVED: HELP! iAtkos crashed my HDD!

[espskog]

I have ...well..HAD...a fully working Kalyway installed base with 2 partitions. First partition was a 100GB for the OS, the second was a 400GB called "data" (where i keep my stuff).

 

Today i booted iAtkos v1.0i, erased the root partition (via diskutility) and started a fresh iAtkos install onto this partition (i did not erase my data-partition..no hehe).

 

then after booting, nothing was there. The hole HDD was empty. There was no VTOC and BOTH my newly installed iAtkos OS was gone, and so was my belowed datapartition (which I did not back up...urrkkff).

 

So my question is: Is there somehow a way for me to get back anything ?

(NB! When i now boot up the iAtkos and diskutility and look at the partitions, all is gone...)

 

PLEASE PLEASE if someone has had similar problem, let me know..

 

*UPDATE:* Maybe if I try to write a new VTOC to the disk setting the partitionsizes exactly the way they were (easy, cause partition 0 was 100GB, the rest was left to the 2nd partition). Then maybe I can mount the filesystem and extract my vital files. Any ideas ?

 

*UPDATE:* After booting up gparted live cd i can actually see my two lost partitions and their respective sizes. This is good news. Maybe I can recover the vtoc somehow and mount the filesystems to retrieve the data from that point. Here is how gparted displays my vtoc:

 

/dev/sda1: FS=fat32 SIZE=200MB partition CYL=000000040-000409639

/dev/sda2: FS=hfs+ SIZE=100GB partitions CYL=000409640-210124839

/dev/sda3: FS=hfs+ SIZE=365,32GB partition CYL=210386984-976510983

Although the sda2+3 says "unallocated", i hope there is a way to mount them somehow. PS! I did not run darwinboot before installing iAtkos because I thought that since kalyway already had a bootloader installed, there was no need to install it once more via the iAtkos DVD. Maybe I was wrong ?

 

*UPDATE:* What I see now is that gparted seem to show me how my partitions "were" when all was working before iAtkos screwed things up But if I do a fdisk -l then all I see is just one plain partition which is the total size of the hdd itself. This one is labeled EFI GPT. I bet the iAtkos installed EFI part did this. I would like to DD the whole disk to a image and to lab-tests on it but I do not have a HDD large enough to hold the image sadly. So I think that maybe if I just use fdisk and write the partitions back using the cylinder-setup (see above) and set thepartitions to their correct TYPE, the maybe I can even mount them.

 

*SOLVED*: I found out that for some crazy reason, even though Disk Utility showed that my partitions were gone, and even though fdisk -l printed out no valid partitions on the VTOC, stll gParted and diskutil list managed to give me the extact sector-layout for the partitions as they were before iAtkos installed crunched the disk. So my solution, in case someone else managed to do what I did, is to write down the vToc from gParted (starting cyl + size of part in cyls) and you canreally just boot up the installation DVD again and launch a Terminal and then using fdisk, just set up the partiotion table again manually and write it. After that I could mount my belowed Data partition (disk0s3) without problems...

 

Anyone else who needs more detailed info on this, send me an email.

 

EPILOGUE: What had happened was that after the iAtkos v1.0i DVD har installed its stuff and said it was ready to reboot, was that for some reason, the VTOC was cleared out and just one partition was created which spanned from CYL=1 to CYL=n+1 (where n=total cyls on disk). For some reason, it had added this partition, and what is more crazy is that it added 1 extra cyl to confuse fdisk even more :-) Gladly, this was all possible to fix and I am now curretly copying all my files from the fixed disk onto another disk so I have a backup :-) I guess I was more than lucky in this case....

 

NB! Thank god for fdisk in OSX where you can enter values in Sectors. This helped alot as my values from gParted was also in sectors so all I had to do was to just enter them directly and write the VTOC again.

Regards.

Espen

[BigPimpin]

Glad you got it fixed. When partitions are blown away, yes, you can get them back as long as you don't start writing over the actual data in the partitions or partition tables. Usually it's just a matter of fixing the pointers in the partition table. And you need the right tools. A Linux LiveCD saved my bacon more than once that way with fdisk, parted and cparted. One of them will even find your partitions automatically and ask it you want to restore them.

 

Disk Utility is not known for screwing things up. My guess is that you did, in fact, do something wrong there in the first place. It's very easy if you're not paying attention, and Disk Utility IMO doesn't give you enough warnings for some of the things it does that affect the entire drive (as opposed to one partition). I could be wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it.

[espskog]

Glad you got it fixed. When partitions are blown away, yes, you can get them back as long as you don't start writing over the actual data in the partitions or partition tables. Usually it's just a matter of fixing the pointers in the partition table. And you need the right tools. A Linux LiveCD saved my bacon more than once that way with fdisk, parted and cparted. One of them will even find your partitions automatically and ask it you want to restore them.

 

Disk Utility is not known for screwing things up. My guess is that you did, in fact, do something wrong there in the first place. It's very easy if you're not paying attention, and Disk Utility IMO doesn't give you enough warnings for some of the things it does that affect the entire drive (as opposed to one partition). I could be wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it.

 

Hi. Thanks for your reply. I did in fact not do anything wrong in Disk Utility because I tried to reproduce the problem (after I had restore my data to an external USb disk hehe) and after I had reinstalled Leo 10.5.1 from the iAtkos v1.0i (not r2 DVD) I got the exact same error: The whole disk was partitioned with one large slice ranging from the first cylinder to the last+1 (which of course is very bad). What I did not was to DL the iAtkos v1.0ir2 DVD hopeing it will work better :-)

 

It seems that somehow when I chose to use EFI bootloader with ACPI kernel it crashed the vtoc and created one big slice with label = EFI and I cannot seem to understand why.

 

So now I am trying to reinstall 10.5.1 from the iAtkos v1.0ir2 DVD using Darwin X86 Bootloader (no EFI) and of course now my vtoc is fine...however, the Hacintosh wont boot on its own even though the slice is set to active (boot in gparted). I will work this out somehow, but its freaking strange what the iAtkos v1.0i (not r2) DVD did.

 

 

Espen