1 Topic by jimww

  • jimww
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Topic: another disk label screw-up

i recently installed ubuntu on my aging mac, and was enjoying the experience, except that my internal drives would not mount.

i set the disk label on my mac drive, thinking that was why it was not being recognized by the system, but instead made the entire drive unreadable.

i had been using a recovery utility to create backups, in case of a partition error, but these show up as partitions when i run testdisk, and have added to my problems.

all of the information is intact, if i can recreate my partition map, which should be backed up somewhere, right? my current system drive is backed up ( Backup.log ) in my home folder, but is that file backed up redundantly anywhere else? i know the system.log gets archived, and i am hoping the backup.log is as well. anyone know where?

my options are limited for recovering my files without accurate directory information. and there is a lot on there to recover. i honestly thought the worst that would happen was that i would make my selected partition unreadable, and it was just an empty swap partition. oops.

i suspect i will be spending the next few days scouring old log files... : (

jim ww

2 Reply by LarryT

  • LarryT
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  • Registered: 2006-07-31
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Re: another disk label screw-up

testdisk is not so easy to use .... :-/
I really have no idea about your problem...

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

3 Reply by jimww

  • jimww
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Re: another disk label screw-up

LarryT wrote:

testdisk is not so easy to use .... :-/
I really have no idea about your problem...

you are not wrong there. but i am learning lots. also finding tools i never new existed on a mac. the unix core is almost visible, now that i have had some experience outside the confines of its GUI. but i am making progress. i found pdisk on the mac, so i can directly modify the partition table. if i can restore the first partition, i will recover the directory protection files from it, which should be enough to restore the other volumes. i hope...

going through my old log files has also been helpful, not just in relation to my drive, but the whole startup and configuration process. stuff i was oblivious to previously. and i have confirmation of my partition titles and numbering. but i still need to find specific reference to the start sectors of each volume. if i had those, i would be confident of a full recovery.

right now, i figure my odds are about 10 to 1. much better than zero...

still open to suggestions.


jim ww