[ale] Did I lose my windows partition ?

[Bob Toxen]

First, proceed with extreme caution.  It is very easy to trash a file system if
you make a mistake.  Your questions suggest that you are not experienced with
system administration to seek out someone who is.

The partition table stores whatevery file type you select, such as NTFS or Linux, as
a 1 byte value.  The actual data stored in that partition (if any) may be of any type you
(or the manufacturer) wrote to it.

Most actual partition types indicate the actual type in the first few bytes of that partition's data
(not to be confused what is in the partition table).

The fdisk program tells you what is in the partition table and can be used to change that
to what actually corresponds to what is in the partition.

The parted program says what actually is in the partition.  Clearly that is ext4.
You could use fdisk (carefully!) to change the partition table to Linux to correspond
to what actually is in the partition.


If said partition is /dev/sda1 you can confirm the actual data is an ext4 file system
with the following command which will read the first few byes of the partition
(not the partition table) to determine the type of file system

  file - < /dev/sda1

which should say

  /dev/stdin: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data (needs journal recovery) (extents) (large files) (huge files)

You might also do the following to check if the file system is ok or corrupted but probably should
do control-C if it wants to make any corrections.  In that case get someone who knows file systems.

  fsck -f /dev/sda1


Be careful and good luck,

Bob

On Sat, Jan 28, 2023 at 03:56:35PM -0500, Narahari Lakshminarayana via Ale wrote:
> Friends:
> Thank you for your time and attention in advance.
> 
> I finally found my  Samsung N120  netbook (laptop) that runs Windows XP.
> I want to use this so I will be able to work on my Samsung tablet aka dont
> want to lose the XP on this. (dont know how to do connect to Android tablet
> from Linux)
> 
> I wanted to partition the disk to 32GB for Win XP and the remaining 92 GB
> for Linux.  I tried to partition and I'm not sure what is happening here.
> 
> fdisk says it has a partition of type NTFS.
> https://imgur.com/RboROyO
> 
> parted says it has ext4
> https://imgur.com/0ymhp6o
> 
> mount command does not allow me to mount it as NTFS
> https://imgur.com/wxSp5dJ
> 
> Does this mean I lost the partition and the XP installation is gone or I
> still have hope ?
> 
> Warm Regards
> -Narahari

> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo