Help I've screwed the pooch! – 245 days old

[zeke36]

Hello all, first post, long time reader.
The wife's pooch that is. Her Dell Laptop. win7 64bit home prem.
I ditched the factory install a year ago and clean installed w7.
All was great until this morning but now I'm at a point where I've restored an image with Easeus Todo. But there are no drive letters on the disk. (4 partitions, usually -100mb hidden, c,e and f)
I need to assign letters in a pre boot environment if possible. So far I've tried Minitool Partition wizard and Gparted but options are not present or greyed out. And diskpart from the cmd prompt from the install disk but I'm stupid when it comes to that.
Any suggestions?
Thanks

[Grogan]

You say you restored an image, was it just an image of the C partition or the entire disk?

Are all the partitions still present? (The hidden 100 mb partition will be the boot partition, where Windows puts the boot loader files. This partition does not get a drive letter) Can you see them in a partitioning utility?

Does Windows boot?

If your image restored correctly you obviously shouldn't have to assign drive letters. It should restore the master boot record and partition tables. The drive letters in a pre boot environment might not be the same as those assigned by Windows proper (and of course, Linux doesn't use drive letters.)

Note: Bad things can happen with logical drives on an extended partition, because they are daisy chained. The first logical drive contains the partition table for the next logical drive, etc. So if a logical drive is deleted or not restored, all subsequent ones will be gone.

If you have a GParted LiveCD, it also includes a program called testdisk which can recover lost partition tables.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

[zeke36]

Hi Grogan.

The image restored was just C. All partitions are still present but no drive letters. Windows won't boot. Even tried repair from install disk but it was just wasted time. (twice)

I'll give Gparted another look but now I'm just saving data with a Linux livecd, in anticipation of another clean install.

Another thing I may try is an older image restore but confidence is low.

Thanks

[BitBender]

I would recommend trying ERD which has some utilities you may find useful for this. It's builtin to your Win7 install.

[Grogan]

Another thing to check is the partition type, just in case it's just this. You could have perfectly valid filesystems, but if the wrong partition type flag is set in the partition table, Windows will completely ignore them and refuse to mount them. It's possible that this is what has occurred, since you say you are copying data (which means you can access the partitions from Linux, which doesn't care about this shit). This shit can happen when something like "GoBack" has been installed. It changes the partition type so it knows which are "GoBack" partitions that it is to track.

NTFS partition type is "7" (or 07, or 0x07 in hex)

If you boot with a Linux disk it should have the Linux fdisk program on it. Get a command prompt and type "sudo fdisk < device name >" (which is probably /dev/sda if it's a laptop, as it will only have one disk. Mine is /dev/sdb, so just ignore that)

First just get a look at it. If you see any NTFS partition that has an ID of anything other than 7, it can be changed (non destructively, it's just a flag)

"fdisk -l /dev/sda" would simply list partitions The "sudo" is because you will need root privileges and those livecds don't usually let you log on as root



If you need to, you can change it. "sudo fdisk /dev/sda" and then press t to change the partition type. Enter the partition number and enter 7 for the code.



When finished working with the fdisk utility, you must type w to write your changes and exit. Type q to chicken out without saving and no changes will be made.

I have successfully gotten Windows to boot again by changing the partition type to 7, when GoBack was broken/improperly removed.

[zeke36]

I did try another image with the same results and found a third that I hadn't labeled properly, so once I determined it was indeed from the laptop I tried that. Success! The main difference was a boot flag/designation that the first 2 didn't have. I'll need to figure out the setting that screws that up.

So just 3 months of updates and we'll be good.

You guys gave great info and this never ending tech learning experience goes on and on. Appreciate it!

[Grogan]

Oh jeeze, that's all that was wrong? That's the partition not being set "active" in Windows terminology. That's another thing the Linux fdisk utility would have immediately shown (and let you toggle back on). In that listing I showed, there are no partitions with the boot flag set, because I boot off another drive. (Using LILO)

Windows sure is retarded. It is the only operating system I know of that needs that flag to be set. It's a throw back from the DOS days, when the code in the master boot record (which still hasn't changed much since DOS) can only look on the first sector of the partition set as active. Windows has a much more complex boot loader now, but STILL relies on that flag to find the boot sector on the partition.

P.S. When you use a drive imaging program, you have to make sure that you include the master boot record in the imaging process, when imaging only a single partition. It may not be the default... I recall seeing that choice in various imaging programs I've used (e.g. Acronis, Macrium)

[zeke36]

Oh jeeze, that's all that was wrong? That's the partition not being set "active" in Windows terminology. That's another thing the Linux fdisk utility would have immediately shown (and let you toggle back on). In that listing I showed, there are no partitions with the boot flag set, because I boot off another drive. (Using LILO)

That's good to know.

P.S. When you use a drive imaging program, you have to make sure that you include the master boot record in the imaging process, when imaging only a single partition. It may not be the default... I recall seeing that choice in various imaging programs I've used (e.g. Acronis, Macrium)

Yes and I know this , it's just a matter of not being lazy. Her music and video and picture files add up to over 60gb and are kept on another partition, so I don't back them up every image. They don't compress well. Anyway a new image has been done so I hope we're back on track. I updated to the latest version of Easeus so that may help. I'm going to keep after this problem though but not this week.

[Dark Angel]

Yes and I know this , it's just a matter of not being lazy. Her music and video and picture files add up to over 60gb and are kept on another partition, so I don't back them up every image. They don't compress well. Anyway a new image has been done so I hope we're back on track. I updated to the latest version of Easeus so that may help. I'm going to keep after this problem though but not this week.

Be very careful doing this. I've been running this way for about five years through more than a couple of OS installs but the last time the installed decided to format the data partition as well as the main partition even though I'd made sure to tell it not to. I lost thousands of files and spent days doing painful file recovery trying to get the important stuff back. I now have an off-line backup drive, but hind-sight is always 20-20 vision.

[BitBender]

It's really not that complicated...

Irreplaceable data is just that - Irreplaceable. I consider pictures and family related files in that category along with other IP sources. After 35 years in IT, I have seen the gamut of strategies and failures. I teach a very simple rule, "If you can;t live without it, then more than one copy is mandatory "- Take 2 or even three copies on separate mediums (tape, Disk mirroring, or a isolated external array-large systems use multiple physical disk arrays).

Now, to extrapolate that down to a more reasonable level, suitable for home use - at least 1 external drive or a home SAN where you mirror to a central disk subsystem on your home network and USB sticks - 64GB sticks aren't that expensive anymore, for the protection they provide. That's a boatload of pictures, and family documents.


The cat's ass is the network SAN which you can put inline and just have machines mirror up to it on occasion or a schedule over the home network. My personal backups are taken to a separate physical drive in the desktop, and then mirrored off on a schedule to the network SAN device. You can achieve this same setup with USB based external drives as well.

[zeke36]

Yes and the fact that this is laptop makes it imperative to be diligent. The wife has no interest in being diligent in this area, which is strange because she is elsewhere. So it falls to me and that's fine....as long as can remember to do it.