How Do I Recover Data From Lost Partition

I created a persistent USB thumb drive boot with LUKS for drive encryption (250 MB /boot and then 7.5 GB ext3 root). There's no swap partition because this is just to store some private files.

I want to make two or three copies of this thumb drive to store apart in case one gets destroyed/lost.

When I am booted from that thumb drive, can I plug in a same sized drive and just do a

Code:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc

command to make a copy of itself to another thumb drive without booting to another host OS? This way when I make changes to one (such as to update the OS, apps, or data), I could then just copy the entire thumb drive over to the other two while still booted in the original USB.

Or would I effectively have to shut down, boot to my normal host OS (or other), and then copy the thumb drives when not booted into them.

How can I make this Data partition be readable and writeable? I tried the "chmod 777" command, but was unsure of what directory to type in . I tried several but the command wouldn't start. This partition is on the second hardrive. I am just trying to get more storage on the second hard drive, so I hope I partitioned correctly. The drive was originally mounted as usr, but I managed to shrink that and make a new partition named Data.

How do I convert a single hard drive to GPT without losing data and without re-installing.

Current systems
Windows 7 Partition /dev/sda1 (Primary)
xubuntu 14.10 /dev/sda5 (Logical) (maybe upgraded to 15.04 when released)
Swap /dev/sda6 (Logical)

I read some guides they were not clear. They also said it is better to do a clean install of each system. None of the guides give a step by step, they always leave something out.

I am not turning on secure boot but I am turning on uefi.

I have a Mini-partition wizard boot cd that can help out but wouldn't covert a system partition.

I have a way to make an iso for xubuntu 14.10


When do you turn on UEFI in the bios before or after converting drive?





Mod, please move to correct forum if needed

Hi All;
Can someone give me some guidance on partitioning a 4TB drive into one partition ?

My goal is to align the partition for best performance. I searched the net for advice and I've found a lot of information on it but am still confused.

After setting the label to gpt,

I tried mkpart primary 0% 100%
and I get the warning that the partition isn't aligned

then I tried mkpart primary 1 -1 (which I really hoped would get me completed)

and when I do an align-check on partition 1, it reports 1 aligned

but then when I do an fdisk -l,
I get the warning that partition 1 does not start on a physical sector boundary

I read that sector size is usually 512 bytes but on some (or perhaps all) larger disks, the sector size is 4096.

I am really not knowledgable in this area and not sure if the above message about partition 1 not starting on a physical sector boundary is important or what impact this will have to my performance. Since these 4tb drives are being used in a media server, I'd like them to be as fast and efficient as possible.

Can you offer some guidance or perhaps some commands on how to partition my (full) 4tb drive into one partition so it is aligned and also so the partition table starts on a physical sector boundary ?

Also, is there a Ubuntu utility to display the sector size of a disk?

I have been researching this issue off and on for a few weeks and would like to finally get this partitioning completed this weekend so I can get on with setting up my system.

Thanks.

Tim

I have a machine with two drives a Compact Flash card (CF) and a Solid State Drive (SSD). Recently I have been experiencing failures of both the SSD and the CF.

When I sent these back to the manufacturer for analysis, they reported that the SSDs and CDs are healthy - but that it appears that the partition table has become corrupt.

Using a Kickstart I created my Linux machine with the partitions split over the CF (to hold the operating system) and the SSD (to hold my data):
/ on the CF
/boot on the CD
/usr on the CF
/home on the SSD
Would Unix have an issue with using the CF to boot and run the operating system and using the SSD to store files?
Has anyone experienced any issues of this kind?

Hi all,

As you can probably tell I am new to Linux and new to the forum, I am using Kali and Mint both as live Linux environments on USB drives, all is good and I am finding my way around, the reason for the post is that I need to copy 15 CF cards that have multiple partitions, Windows isn't really an option as it can only see one partition on a removable drive, so here goes with Linux.

The CF cards contain Windows Embedded XP in one partition and a separate partition for user data which isn't protected, not that the contents matter, only the fact that it is bootable with multiple partitions, the object is to upgrade the old 2gb cards to 4gb cards to add an additional program on the embedded drive, but they are both full.

as long as I can copy both partitions over the partition size doesn't matter as I can resize that if necessary, but I need both partitions to copy over to the new drive.

I have read that dd command is the way to go but cant find much on multiple partitions which display in Linux as two drives, so how do I go about this, any pointers

Ideally I would like to automate the process as this is something that we could end up doing on a regular basis, I have seen a USB drive that was plugged into a PC and through a basic GUI allowed you to copy a HDD but I don't know If that would do both partitions, something for the future?

Hi, yesterday I decided to install Deepin in a dual boot. I later decided I no longer needed/wanted it so I deleted the partition. Apparently I had grub on that partition as well, and now my laptop only goes to grub rescue and will not boot.
I have an acer aspire v5 touch. Removing the hard drive is not an option. I have tried to access UEFI but my computer just beeps and goes to grub rescue. I have grub rescue disk on a flash drive, I used unetbootin to do that, but iI cannot get to any boot menu (f12), and when I use ls (hd0)/ I get a unknown file system error. Please help, and sorry for my grammar/formatting, I'm on mobile.
Tl;dr: Deleted partition containing grub and deepin, now can only get to grub rescue, and I keep getting an unknown file system error, please help.

(BTW I'm running Xubuntu 15.04)

I'm starting to understand Luckybackup. And gold_finger said:

Quote:
Assuming your Xubuntu filesystem is Ext4, example of doing initial backup would be something like this:

* Spare USB with large partition formatted as Ext4 and labeled "BACKUPS"
I know the EXT4 is more friendly to Linux but all my flash drives are FAT32 (and I'll be backing up to those flash drives) and I'd really like to keep them that way (because sometimes I do plug them into Windows machines--and I know FAT32 works with both Windows and Linux). So is there any reason I would have to use Ext4 and not FAT32 in backing up stuff in LuckyBackup?

I confess to great ignorance about the difference between the EXT and FAT formats. Like if I do format a flash drive to EXT 4 and want to plug the flash drive into a Windows computer it just doesn't work? Like, what's the advantage to using EXT4 then if FAT 32 works with Linux and Windows? What are the disadvantages to using EXT4?

Thanks.

On my current system I have drives sda, sdb, sdc; 1TB, 1.5TB, 1.5TB respectively.
SATA drive a is where I installed the OS and the other SATA drives b and c are from an old system that was linux software mirror, something I was using to play and learn. Now I have added b and c to my current system and before doing so I stopped the mirror and removed the partitions. I added the drives to my current system and used cfdisk to create one partition on each and then mounted the new drives. I then run ls and I see bin/....etc. listed in the new drive. Is this normal or when I create the new drive partitions should I use Logical instead of Primary.

Is there a way to get my drives back to non raid that I have missed doing?

Thanks

Hi

I am very suprised! I previously had a Windows 7 desktop, dual boot with Windows Server 2012 R2. I didn't care much about 2012 R2, so I went with a Debian server on another computer.

I wanted to triple boot my computer, so I looked at my BIOS to see if my computer has UEFI support, but it doesnt, so I am not able to boot to GPT. One decision lead to another, and I decided not to install Hackintosh. As part of this process, I had converted it to GPT, and then back to MBR when installing Windows 8.1 Pro. Everything went well.

When I went to install Debian 7, it was not recognizing anything on that drive. I found out it was a backup GUID partition table left over. I used fixparts found on rodsbooks.com, and I fixed the disk partition table.

Now this is where things get weird. Before installing, I created a primary partition for /, and an extended partition with 5 logical partitions inside it. I installed Debian 7 from a live install DVD, and I manually created the partitions. I created a 4GB /, 16GB /usr, 4GB /var, and 64GB /home. Then I left a bunch of free space (~145GB) and then 16GB swap space. (I have 8GB ram, and I plan to hibernate sometimes).

After a successful installation, installation of packages, reboots, and frustration with PCI card problems, I rebooted to Windows 8.1.

Upon opening diskpart gui, I was greeted with the picture attached.

WHAT IS GOING ON?