I deleted it! Now what?
I have a home server running Amahi on Fedora Linux. I tell everyone it’s for backups and media, but it’s really so I can tinker with it and have to something to complain about. While prepping it this weekend for an upgrade, I got careless and decided to merge a partition that wasn’t being used with the boot partition.
Except it was being used. Imagine my surprise when it wouldn’t boot. And after some poking around, I was able to phrase the question that was to determine my course of action for the next 12 hours: “Er… where’s the operating system?”
To cut a long story short, I was able to recover the deleted partition with TestDisk, which comes with the handy handy HANDY Parted Magic CD. Both are free and indispensable.
TestDisk is open source data recovery software for recovering lost partitions and making non-booting disks bootable again.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
PhotoRec is open source file recovery software that finds lost files from hard disks and digital cameras, even if the file system has been damaged or reformatted.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
PartedMagic is an open source suite of programs for disk, partition and file system management. It includes TestDisk and PhotoRec (and many others). It runs from a CD, no install required.
- Format internal and external hard drives.
- Move, copy, create, delete, expand & shrink hard drive partitions.
- Clone your hard drive, to create a full backup.
- Test hard drives for impending failure.
- Test memory for bad sectors.
- Benchmark your computer for a performance rating.
- Securely erase your entire hard drive, wiping it clean from all data.
- Gives access to non-booting systems allowing you to rescue important data.