Kernel not found, partitions seems to be gone

[surfnsound]

When i tried to bring my computer out of hibernate this morning, it would not start back up. OK, it happens. I restarted it, but then i got a message that I can not remember, and I got a Grub command prompt. I checked avaiable options and saw boot was one of them, tried that, and got a message that it could not find the kernel. I got a suggeston of how to remount the root on Reddit, but i needed to know the number for the partition. I went into windows to find out, and it seems the partition is now gone. Can anyone tell me if there is anyway to fix this or even some clue how it might have happened?

[bildr]

you can enumerate partitions in the grub cli. good luck, it isn't something that is easy to explain, once you do it you got it. or you can boot from live media and fsck all partitions/make sure they exist.

[surfnsound]

It looks like the partition is gone, is there no chance to get my data back from it?

[gamblor01]

How did you verify that the partitions are gone? I would boot up with a live cd and check with:

sudo fdisk -l

What does it list? Another alternative would be to enter into cfdisk (but don't make any changes).

I haven't heard of this type of thing happening unless the drive itself was going bad. As bildr suggested, if you can, you will probably want to run fsck on your partitions. You might also consider getting a new hard drive. I would try to back everything up as soon as possible. Alternatively, you can use the dd command to clone one hard drive to another.

For example, suppose you only have one drive (/dev/sda) and you put a new one into your system (/dev/sdb). Then you can boot up in a live cd and clone the drive exactly by issuing the command:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32256

At that point you can detach the "old" drive and leave the new one in. It will now be seen as /dev/sda and the system will function with the new drive as if nothing ever happened.

Get the output of "sudo fdisk -l" from a live cd and post it here. Hopefully you can salvage the data.

[ryan858]

if the partition table is corrupted then that would explain the missing partition. You can use Testdisk to recover files regardless of the partition table. It will also find deleted files, but that's not likely to be the case. Another possibility is to just remake the partition table the way it should be, and that might just restore it back to how it was.

For example, if you make a partition and put some files on it, then use fdisk to delete the partition (and don't write anything else to the disk while its deleted) then you can add a new partition the same size and it will have the same files as the deleted one did, because its the same data in the table, pointing to the same locations on disk. Like if you make a 10240 MB partition and add files, then delete it, and make a new 10240 MB partition, then it will be an exact clone of the old one, and all the files will still be there.

[yetiman64]

Definitely use

sudo fdisk -l

to check if its missing 1st (grub errors can cause all sorts of problems).

I personally have had to recover hard drive partitions from corrupted partition tables in the past using testdisk (booted the partitions using GAG bootloader- yet the very bootdrive gparted was being run from was being seen as unallocated by gparted). You can scan a drive completely with testdisk and provided its results are as you set it up, you can have it rewrite the partition tables and fix the partition access for grub to use etc.

Good luck.

[surfnsound]

Ran fdisk, here is the output:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7c09973a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 192 1536000 27 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 192 9730 76612604 7 HPFS/NTFS

sda1 I think is a system partition that was on there from Toshiba. sda2 has all my windows files on it.

[dino99]

mini howto: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...4&postcount=14

[yetiman64]

Ran fdisk, here is the output:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7c09973a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 192 1536000 27 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 192 9730 76612604 7 HPFS/NTFS

sda1 I think is a system partition that was on there from Toshiba. sda2 has all my windows files on it.

NO linux partitions shown here at all. Possibly corrupted partition table. Can you still boot into Windows? (I'm assuming that's where you're currently working from).

What Ubuntu OS and grub version are you using? If 9.10 or later and grub 2 - Next step would be to download and run the bootinfo script from sourceforge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/

To use this, boot up a live cd to a desktop, open firefox and download the script, make it executable, run the script and post the results.txt file here either in quote tags or as an attachment (this script will output quite a lot of detail at times).

Edit: A good guide to using the bootinfo script is http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1291280

This will give much more detail as to your setup and any problems. If your Ubuntu partitions still aren't found testdisk may be one way to recover them.

[surfnsound]

I just ran TestDisk in Windows, it did find the old partition, and asked if I wanted to recreate the partition. I selected Yes, rebooted, and now I can't start up at all except for with the Live CD. Running Gparted from the LiveCd wont come up with anything, even though it reads an 80 GB storage device, but tat's all it says,, no longer Toshiba.... like it used to.