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Topic: Did I brick it for good?

So I was resizing my primary partition in order to dual-boot with the Windows7 beta, and about midway through my partition, I accidentally clicked the cancel button.  When the "Are you sure you wanna do this, moron?" window popped up, it would appear that I clicked the "Yes I do" option, halting the partitioning process.  When I finished crying, I tried rebooting, and my BIOS told me that there was no OS available to boot from.

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Re: Did I brick it for good?

Sorry, I'm still a bit of a n00b here, it would seem.

My question now is this: is there any way to recover the damaged partition?  Is it even worth trying?

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Re: Did I brick it for good?

I'm afraid you have problem. Cancelling a resize operation just at the beginning, on the first seconds could be no harmful, because GParted performs some checks before the resizing operation itself. Cancelling in the middle of the process, can damage seriously the file system.

A first idea would be to check if the partition is still accessible as ntfs. This can be done with a Linux live cd, like Knoppix, Ubuntu, Fedora etc. Most major Linux distributions contain drivers for ntfs. If the partition is still accessible, you can:

- try to restore bootup configuration (for mswindows, this can be done from the recovery console from the installation cd).

- copy files under Linux environment to any external hard drive or memory stick.

If the file system is inaccessible, there are some tools to try, especially photorec and testdisk.

Photorec can search a partition or hard drive for files of various types to recover. Nevertheless, I'd like to be clear, very often it is easier to search all over the net to find and download again the damaged files than recover them and check them if they are still good.

Testdisk is a partition recovery tool, that searches the entire drive to find possible partition limits. However it can't recover the contents in an internally damaged partition.
Both come on live cd. You can find them easily using google search engine.

(Topic moved to the support section)

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***