Recovering partitions

[Mark_in_Hollywo]

While trying to make my /home a partition of it's own, and by running LiveCD and GParted, I tried to resize/move my /

That / is about 250 gig in size and the only other partitions are:


ubuntu@ubuntu:/home$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000080

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 38536 309540388+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 38537 38913 3028252+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 38537 38913 3028221 82 Linux swap / Solaris

I have testdisk running and it says I can load the "backup".

What happened was this, I was having problems getting the various commands in GParted to match the instructions I have for making /home as a separate partition. After getting over that hump, I had GParted resizing and moving "to the left" the /dev/sda1 partition.

After 20 minutes or so, I thought the process was stuck as there is no indicator bar or % of completion stated. So I cancelled the GParted resizing. When I next tried to boot, big problems:

I get past Grub, Starting up and get my Ubuntu splash screen and the completion bar get to about 25% completed. Then the screen changes to ascii text and says multiple-blocks are trying to share inode and a long number. Eventually this locks the keyboard. It happens in regular and recover mode boots. The kernel is 2.6.22-14.

Is there a way to fix this?

[John A]

The first thing you should do when you're experiencing any kind of hard drive-related problems is to make sure that any important data is backed up. If your data is still accessible (even from a LiveCD), and you didn't back it up, now would be a good time to do that.

Your data's safe? Good. The next step would be to run the partitions through with fsck, which is the *nix equivalent of ScanDisk. Boot back into the LiveCD, and open up a terminal window. What I like to do first is gain unrestricted root access, this way I don't have to bother with prefixing everything with 'sudo':

sudo su

Now that you have root access, first make sure that all your partitions are unmounted:

mount | grep /media

Any output listed in /media means that there's partitions mounted, and they need to be safely unmounted before you can start disk checks and repairs. So, do something like the following:

umount /media/partition1 /media/partition2 etc

Replace 'partition1', 'partition2', etc. with the /media mountpoints the 'mount' command gave you earlier.

Now that you've unmounted all your partitions, you can start disk checks. Run the following for each partition:

fsck /dev/sda1

Replace '1' with the partition number. If fsck repairs any errors, make sure you keep running fsck on the partition until it doesn't give any more errors, then proceed with the next partition.

Hopefully if the damage isn't too bad you'll end up with a bootable Linux environment once again. Good luck.