The Zana Zen

Here is how I burned away 4 precious hours from my life:

Yesterday I went and bought a new Western Digital 250GB HD because I wanted to install another two operating systems, I planned to install Windows Vista and Fedora Core 5 Linux.

I created some partitons for the OSs and first installed FC5, I’d also created a 180GB for misc files. After I installed Fedora, I filled the “Misc” partition with some files from my older HDs. then I noticed that I accidently created the 180GB partition as a primary one while the Vista partition was logical.

As you probably know, a maximum of 4 primary partitions could be created on the same HD, and operating systems could only be installed on primary partitions. You can however create one of those partitions to be an extended one and create more logical partitions inside of it.

Well, I turned to partition magic 8, a widely known partitioning tool for the windows platform, and done the following:

1. Convert the Vista Partition to primary
2. Convert the “Misc” partition to logical

I guess that those two simple tasks were hard for PM8 because after applying them, my computer didn’t show the “misc” partition at all!!!

I booted from my fresh fedora linux and installed the ntfs kernel module (arghhh Linux…), after this useless waist of time I didn’t have success in mounting the “misc” partition either. obviously those files where important to me so I tried to fix the partition.

After searching for and installing several partition restoring tools I encountered TestDisk (who gave it it’s name anyway?), a software that supposedly fixes partition tables, It’s being done by analyzing the HD and writing over the partition table. So I took the risk (the only thing I could lost is the new fedora installation). After booting again from windows, I was relieved to see that the partition appeared in “My Computer” and that the files are there!

The files are there alright but about 20% of them have additional random bytes added to them at the begining! but I still look on the bright side

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 11:02 pm and is filed under random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.