[ale] grub rescue

[John Pilman]

Here's an update on my progress with the scrambled partition table and
encrypted home directory.
Using dd I copied the hard drive and did the rest of this on the copy.
I ran testdisk from a live boot usb flash drive and was able
re-identify the unallocated partition as a linux partition and write
the partition table.
After a boot or two, gparted saw the partition as sda5.
Long story short for now, Ubuntu 11.04 includes the ultility
encryptfs-recover-private which was able to mount the encrypted
/home/john and I have now copied my files.
Caveat #1 - it took me a while to learn that my live boot usb Ubuntu
11.04 had to be 64 bit since my original partition was 64 bit.
Caveat #2 - some of these steps were very time consuming.

I next plan to try to see if I can make the hard drive bootable again.

...John

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 4:05 PM, John Pilman <jcpilman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the ideas. I am starting with a second hard drive and the
> dd command as Derek said and I am going to try to recreate how I go
> into this mess.  Understanding, at his point, is more valuable than
> the little bit of data since my last last backup.
>
> To partially answer some questions:
> The disk started with Windows 7 and I installed Ubuntu 10.10 with dual
> boot.  So the partition utility is the one used during the Ubuntu
> install.  Also, I vaguely remember a question about encryption during
> that process.  I can't say for sure whether the partition or just the
> home directory was encrypted.
> Also, I'm not sure where the boot record was.
>
> If possible, I will reinstall everything and then find those answers.
> At, the speed this dd is going, I have some free time to do more research.
> ...John
>
> On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Jim Lynch
> <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com> wrote:
>> On 02/18/2012 05:19 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>>> Once you make your copy, try making all your unallocated space into a
>>> single linux partition.  Then you can dd the first few MB off into a file
>>> (running a RAMDISK rescue environment, of course) and use 'file' to see if
>>> you got it right.  Were you using LVM?  Then from there you might be able
>>> to get lucky and find your partition endpoints.
>> Since you can now with grub2 boot from LVM that might be the answer.
>> I'm surprised that grub didn't recognize that.  I'd find a live cd or
>> Knopix cd that understands LVM and see if the partition contains LVM
>> volumes before I did anything rash.
>>
>> Jim.
>> _______________________________________________