Blog: data recovery - Lost all my partition after installing Ubuntu 14.4 LTS

Thursday, February 18, 2016

data recovery - Lost all my partition after installing Ubuntu 14.4 LTS

Yesterday I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with a bootable pendrive. Before that I had 3 partitions on my windows system (C:, D:, and E:). During the installation process I thought it would be the same as windows where it formats the C: drive and that Linux gets installed in C:. I chose the second option where it said erase disk and install Ubuntu.

Now I cannot find any of my drives. I have read hundreds of threads in this forum and tons of youtube tutorial to retrieve it by using testdisk but could not figure it out. When I use it with liveUSB it shows two storage systems. When I run (disks) from the application the result shows:

Disk Drives:
500gb Hard disk
Hitachi HTS727550A9E364
Size:500gb
Partitioning : Master Boot record
Device: /dev/sda1
Partition Type : Linux Bootable
Contents : Ext2(version 1.0) not mounted

And below Disk Drives section there is Other Devices which has:

491GB block device
8.5gb block device
967mb loop device

And when I run fdisk -l it shows:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00045999
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      499711      248832   83  Linux
/dev/sda2          501758   976771071   488134657    5  Extended
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5          501760   976771071   488134656   8e  Linux LVM
Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root: 491.3 GB, 491333353472 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 59734 cylinders, total 959635456 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-swap_1: 8464 MB, 8464105472 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1029 cylinders, total 16531456 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-swap_1 doesn't contain a valid partition table
Disk /dev/sdb: 15.9 GB, 15925772288 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15188 cylinders, total 31105024 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x20ac7dda
This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   ?  3224498923  3657370039   216435558+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb2   ?  3272020941  5225480974   976730017   16  Hidden FAT16
/dev/sdb3   ?           0           0           0   6f  Unknown
/dev/sdb4        50200576   974536369   462167897    0  Empty
Partition table entries are not in disk order

How do I recover my partitions?

Boot from a live CD or USB.

Install TestDisk and Mount the drive then open a terminal and run

 sudo testdisk

follow these steps

enter image description here

here you have to select your hard disk.
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Deeper Search (this should find your old partition, you can stop it after it found it)

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Once you found what you think it's your partition select it with up/down arrows

[P] for list files and look if it seems it

[q] to quit list files

I have changed pictures for better understanding. This is from wiki link at bottom

enter image description here
Using the left/right arrow keys, change the status of the selected partition from D(eleted) to L(ogical). This way you will be able to recover this partition