Accidentally erased 1% of my HDD!

[emeraldgirl08]

This is a warning for people who use Killdisk and have two HDD's linked to their Thinkpads.

MAKE SURE YOU'RE KILLDISKING THE RIGHT DRIVE!

I accidentally erased 1% of my primary drive in my R52 before I realized it. I had a crappy 40gb 4200 drive I was wanting to erase but chose the wrong drive.

So now I'm pretty sure there is a way to fix this. An attempt at booting led to the Phoenix screen and the standard No Operating System found. I used the W7 dvd to attempt a repair but that didn't work. I tried an Ubuntu livecd and the partition editor shows 72gb of unallocated space.

How could that be if I stopped the killdisk at 1%????

Any help would be appreciated. I certainly didn't plan on spending a full-day [censored] around with reinstalling two OS'. TIA.

[RealBlackStuff]

Those programs start wiping from sector 1 onwards.
In there is your partition table.
Killdisk being what it is, unfortunately there is NO recovery.
Take a day off to reinstall

[emeraldgirl08]

Argh!

I knew I had to do something like that! I checked via Linux and usually you can see your partitions. In my case it is all unallocated but the IBM system partition (whatever that is). I'm in the process of destroying that hard drive...not literally but killdisking it.

What kills me is I ABSOLUTELY LOVE Linux on the R52 and I went through a horrible nightmare trying to get the dual-boot to work properly. My thread on the ubuntu forums spanned 50+ posts of ppl guiding me through the procedure.

I'm not totally PO'd. You gotta laugh at some of the dumb things you do but reinstalling an OS is a PITA! Even if I did keep an image of my W7 on the same drive I'm guessing that would have been worthless???

[kiwipad]

There are tools available to recover data from disks , even if the boot sector/partition table have been destroyed (something like Partition Table Doctor).

Tools like Killdisk usually prevent this by writing random "data" across the entire disk, making whatever was there before much more difficult (but still not impossible with the right forensic resources) to "read". If you had only "killed" the first 1% you probably could have recovered from that. But assuming you have Windows in your first partition, that OS would probably at least have needed a repair install as well. The reason the disk showed "unallocated" is simply because there is no partition table to tell your Linux (Live CD?) OS otherwise.

Whether it's worth the hassle of trying to recover a disk would be determined by what's on it. A re-install is probably easier if there's nothing of value.

And as you've now totally killed the disk, a bit academic now anyway !!

But it will be good practice to re-install Ubuntu again and as you've done it once, should be a lot less painful this time

Good luck !

IG

(written from openSuse 11.1 on my T42 - have to get a sig sorted !)

[emeraldgirl08]

Kiwi. You have ATI figured out on Suse11.1??? Is that the Gnome or KDE version distro?

Yeah I already have W7 reinstalled, up, and running on my R52. The Ubuntu will wait for another day. I'm just glad the W7 is back up and running

Although I still cannot get my screen to shut off on function and f3 keys.

[kiwipad]

If it makes you feel any better, a few years ago I was very pleased with myself, having created an unattended install around an old Suse distro; burned it to a CD and went to make a coffee, leaving the newly burned disk in the drive.

Lights and coffee machine flickered while the java was brewing but I thought nothing of it.

Returned to my desk to find the "brown-out" had caused the PC to re-boot...with the bootable, unattended Linux install CD in the drive, which was of course set as the first bootable device. So my machine had a nice shiny new Suse OS in place of what was there originally !! Not exactly the test I had in mind for the unattended install.

It's all a learning experience

IG

[kiwipad]

ATI latest drivers don't support the older adapters, so while I had all the eye-candy of Compiz running very sweetly under openSuse 11.0 on the T42 (ATI Radeon 7500) with the then current flgrx drivers with full 3D, I have to use the standard mesa driver & do without the toys under 11.1. Otherwise that Suse install is pretty much "out of the box" using KDE 3.5 (the updates were a real pain and the early 4.x releases were buggy)

The T43 is running a "lightened" kernel based on an unofficial KDE4.3 release and is tuned for speed and only including what I need so haven't done anything with the graphics on that. Couldn't even tell you what driver its using - I'll boot it up later & get back to you.

I've never used Ubuntu - it never appealed somehow. Being a Novell fan since they invented networking - and I am old enough to have been there (cue controversy - the network bit, not my age !) I've stuck with Suse. Also with Suse and Fedora/RH being much more common in the commercial world it makes more sense to me.

I'll now have to re-boot this into W7 and see which Fn keys work...

IG

[emeraldgirl08]

I have Suse Gnome 11.1 on one of my laptops and I enabled desktop effects and now am stuck with a white screen. I can rotate the screen via cube effect if I press the mouse button at the lower right corner of the screen. I just can't see anything so I can turn the desktop effects off! Before I enabled there was a box that basically said there was no driver for the ATI card I had and if I still wanted to turn effects on.

Yeah. So I have a lot to learn

Posted that problem in suse forums but no solution yet. I may have to wipe that partition and reinstall suse or go with something more OOB ATI friendly. Got some research to do. I like Ubuntu but don't mind trying out different distros.

[mgo]

Kiwi. You have ATI figured out on Suse11.1??? Is that the Gnome or KDE version distro?

Yeah I already have W7 reinstalled, up, and running on my R52. The Ubuntu will wait for another day. I'm just glad the W7 is back up and running

Although I still cannot get my screen to shut off on function and f3 keys.

For Fn+F3 to work, you need some of the Lenovo drivers, but you might already know that. My R52 runs just super-dooper with Windows 7. It's going to be a hit for Microsoft (at last, after the Vista flop-er-roo)

Look for System Interface Driver and hotkey features at http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... -BETA.html

[emeraldgirl08]

mgo.

I followed your suggestions from a previous thread I posted. I must admit I've been sidetracked all month! At any rate I finally installed the drivers and all the hotkeys I use work

TY!

[kiwipad]

Well, mgo beat me to the link to IBMs W7 support site.

As for ATI under Linux, the T43p has the ATI FireGL V3200 which has "out of the box" 3D support using the kernel-provided fglrx_pci driver (no ATI proprietary d/l required), and the eye-candy (sorry, Desktop Effects !) also work without adding anything - this is not using Compiz btw, just the built-in effects that are now part of the standard build.

Here is a pic of the T43 doing silly cube things: http://picasaweb.google.com/ian.g.nz/Th ... 5577938594 This is KDE4.3x btw

And I dug out this of the T42 running Compiz under 11.0/KDE3.5 last year :http://picasaweb.google.com/ian.g.nz/Th ... 9838990674

Not sure which Suse forum you posted your "white screen" issue on but this one has heaps of good info: http://forums.opensuse.org/

IG

[kiwipad]

Sorry, we're getting horribly off-topic here, but you do know that there is a new release (11.2) of openSuse slated for November? Might be worth waiting to see how that finalizes before jumping to try it.

IG

[emeraldgirl08]

Thanks for the link Kiwi.

I have a couple of screenshots I took using compiz on my former-T30.

Square Intrepid Compiz

Circular Intrepid Compiz

I did not know that 11.2 was coming out in November! Karmic Koala is out next month also! I'm pretty excited and feel...quite frankly spoiled by the software we're receiving