! to the table of contents
< to the previous section:
> to the next section:

7.7 How to recover from an partially formatted disk?

Often people (mostly on Intel) complain about a formatted disk (sometimes partially) due to an installation process error of some other OS. There is a chance to recover most of the data. The following assumes you are on Intel, other hardware user have to handle things much less complicated, but the way is similar:

• Prepare a new hard drive for booting
• Don't try to repair the broken drive!
• On Intel run fdisk to repartition the drive as it was before. If you are not able to do this, you are lost. Delete all evtl. new created partitions. By repartitioning, you won't loose data on the drive.
• Run disk on the broken drive e.g. type disk -rsd1h.
• Now scan the disk for superblocks by entereing the scan command at the interactive disk command prompt.
• If your disk was partially formatted, use a higher superblock number to supply fsck with an new superblock. E.g. if a superblock was found at 3145 use fsck -b3145 -y /dev/sd1a (assuming the first partition is the broken one).
• After this run, it is most important to reboot without syncing the drives! E.g. just turn off the computer without shutting down, or use the reboot -n command.
• After rebooting the run fsck again, if it isn't done by the system itself.
• You should be able to access the drive again now. Recovered files are placed in the /lost+found directory.

• (continue with 7.8 What about the ZIP drive?)