Recovering partitions

Question

Well, I screwed up one of the HDDs that I have installed, causing the computer to not be able to recognize the filesystem type. The HDD was on sdb and had two partitions, one NTFS for Windows, and another Fat32 that I was storing media on. I did some reading around and found testdisk and I was able to get back into the Windows partition, but I've no idea how to find the media one. Does anyone have any ideas? This media one is the most important one for me to recover.
I tried photorec too, which comes with testdisk, but it was only pulling stuff from the windows partition, not the other one.

Answer 1

Amarildo wrote:I always save a copy of the MBR in case something goes wrong. Once deleted the partition table and couldn't get my partitions back, but I had a copy of it. It's also useful if you thing some malware is in the MBR (specially since you use Windows too).
This is good advice; however, most newer computers use the GUID Partition Table (GPT), not MBR, so backing up the MBR won't be of much use with them. To create a backup of a working GPT, I recommend using gdisk; its "b" option will back up the GPT data to a file. You can then restore the data using the "l" option on the recovery & transformation menu.
Of course, this doesn't help Somnus. I'm posting it just in the hope that somebody will follow this advice and be saved Somnus's pain in the future.
As to Somnus's problem, if you've recovered one partition, it's conceivable that you'll be able to recover the other just by creating a new partition in a suitable spot. If the recovered partition is the first one on the disk, and if they were both primary partitions, use fdisk (or gdisk if the disk was GPT) to create a new partition beginning on the first sector after the end of the existing partition. If the second partition was a logical partition, then I recommend creating a new primary partition with a gap of 2048 sectors. (I don't recommend creating a new logical partition because that requires writing data to the disk in an area that might hold filesystem data if you guess wrong about the partition sizes.) If the recovered partition is at the end of the disk, create your new primary partition beginning with sector 2048.
Once you create the partition, you can try mounting it. If that fails, though, do not use "fsck" or other recovery tools on the partition -- at least, not in a mode that changes data in the partition. A failure to mount the partition could indicate filesystem damage, but it could also be that you guessed wrong about where the partition begins. If you guessed wrong and use "fsck" to "fix" the data, you'll end up doing more damage. You could use "fsck" in a mode that scans but does not write data to see if it seems to think there's a real filesystem in the partition. Read the "fsck" man page (or, better, the "dosfsck" man page, since it's a FAT partition you're trying to recover) to learn about its options. I don't recall what they are, offhand.
This approach of guessing about where the partition begins is an act of desperation, but it sounds like you're at that point....