[ale] fedora OOPS

[Brian Pitts]

On 02/07/2010 01:16 PM, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> well, I thought ( idle hands..) that I would install fedora 12 on my laptop, 
> dual-boot with my existing XP, replacing ubuntu. This is an older Dell 
> laptop, that had a dell partition /dev/sda2, XP NTFS partition, /dev/sda3, 
> and linux / & /home & /swap partitions, /dev/sda5-6-7.
> 
> SOOooo, after trying out the fedora liveCD, it gives me this Your drive needs 
> to be reinitialized, WARNING, you may lose your data.. googling, I THOUGHT 
> this would be non-destructive UNTIL you get to the actual partitioning 
> menu... WRONG. when it got to that menu, it showed my entire 98Gb drive as 
> being freespace. I cancelled out, rebooted, and... grub-rescue, no OS.. no 
> joy..
> parted doesn't show anything either. I don't have a ghost image, I DO have 
> backups, but, is there anything else that I could run that MIGHT be able to 
> rebuild it the way it was? I can't believe fedora would actually initialize a 
> drive that had DATA on it..

I think all this does is write a new master boot record [0]. Testdisk
[1] will probably be able to recover your partition table.

I know this situation sucks, but the installer explicitly warned you
about what it was going to do and you told it okay.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
[1] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts