Once again, tech bites me in the ass

[skymera]

I love technology, I love to fiddle with it even more. Usually, it ends broken.

Well tonight I decided to look into GPT partition table opposed to MBR for one of my hard drives. I run Windows 7 and Arch Linux primarily. Arch is (was) on a 15GB partition out of a 1TB drive, the other 950GB+ was filled with pictures, movies, games and programs that I have purchased or installed over the years.

The changeover to GPT from MBR was nice and simple, no errors, everything went smooth. Upon reboot the bootloader did nothing, none of my 3 hard drives had a working bootloader so I had no working PC. ARGH.

Seems like GRUB needed a 2MB partition to load some file in to understand GPT or someting..blah blah, not important....so I thought.

Being late, wanting to go to bed and also wanting a working PC I booted up a Linux live cd and followed a crude guide I found online to convert GPT back to MBR. Seemed legit. Shoulda done some more research as that conversion wiped the disk

I've just spent the last hour reinstalling Arch from command line and also getting Windows booting again. I've no choice but to create a 900GB~ partition on the drive and hope a deep file recovery scan will yield some magic. But i'm doubtful.

I'm totally bummed out. In total I've lost over 750GB.

BAH, can someone move to non-car chat please

 

[hoopdub]

I love technology, I love to fiddle with it even more. Usually, it ends broken.

Well tonight I decided to look into GPT partition table

Read to here, then got lost

 

[Jen319]

I think i get it...kinda..
Basically you're running 2 operating systems on one unit and trying to sort out the way they are seperate within the 1000GB (1tb) HDD....kinda
unfortunatly it didn't go according to plan...Hope your recovery program can scour something up for you...do you have hard copies of at least some stuff on there?
....no back up?

Sorry I can't really help you, I'm not properly on it with stuff like that
...I'm still a bit basic when it comes to tech...I still have a phone with actual buttons...I know I'm so last decade XD
I have no clue what GPT and ..the other one are ^_^

I can see how it would be basically soul destroying...Good luck with it..I hope that when you load it up as Windows it will ask you to go back to a previous version when it worked...although if you've already had to re-do the OS from the CD...then they option may have already alluded you

My home PC had a tonne of virus', because my brother is an idiot...so i had to reboot the whole thing from cd because it wouldn't go past the black countdown screen (like when it hasn't shutdown properly) and was completely dead
...luckily it gave me the option to reboot from a previous time...and we didn't loose anything...my brother did get a clip round the ear though, the guy is 31...he should know better right?

 

[frank]

do any of your files/pics show with the live disc skymera ?
we,ve just solely run live disc puppy on this lappy for the last few years

 

[skymera]

do any of your files/pics show with the live disc skymera ?
we,ve just solely run live disc puppy on this lappy for the last few years

Sadly not, partition table was nuked along with everything the disk contained including my original Arch install
File recovery has found 144,000 files, all with jumbled filenames. So far rescued a game and 30+ movies. The rescue continues!

 

[SirChris]

have fun mate! I always try to run operating systems to separate drives. Most of my setups now are run on an ESXi host, V'ing my systems to thin clients and my laptop is fat. Storage to VLuns on my SAN and media storage to a NAS. GRUB is a nightmare in my opinion. Why dont you virtualise your linux on a wondows install or the other way round? Saves the troubles in the future?

 

[skymera]

First time anything like this has happened. I've had troubles in the past with GRUB throwing a fit but never had a drive wiped.
Maybe I just got careless.

I seldom boot Windows, maybe once or twice a month to play a game, but since they were on the drive that was wiped looks like Windows will just be stagnant.

Good thing about losing Arch was it finally made me run a slimmed down version.