[K12OSN] corrupt partition table

[Gustav J Kramer]

On Fri, 2005-01-07 at 07:47 -0500, Petre Scheie wrote:
> The power went out yesterday, and so my server went down.  When the power came back on, 
> the server tried to boot, but failed apparently because the partition table got 
> corrupted--it just spits out a 'Insert boot disk' error.  I booted from Knoppix and it 
> was during that bootup that I saw the message about the partition table being bad.  Once 
> Knoppix is up, it doesn't show any hard drive partitions on its desktop, so that pretty 
> much confirms it.  Is there any way to deal with a trashed partition table?  I figure 
> I'll have to reformat and re-install, which is okay--a reason to upgrade from the 
> K12LTSP version 3.1.2 that was on there.  But there are a few files I'd like to retrieve 
> beforehand if possible.  Complicating the situation is that it was using LVM, although 
> I'm not certain it was used for the root partition; unfortunately, I can't remember how 
> it was layed out.  But I think using LVM changes the way partitions are handled.  Are 
> there any tools for dealing with crippled LVM systems?
> 
> Petre
> 
This is probably a bit drastic and I hope others will have better ideas
but as a last resort you could try The Sleuth Kit and Autopsy.  I don't
know if you can move the drive to another computer and work directly on
the drive or if you have to make an image first.  I have always imaged
the damaged drive first, then worked on the image to recover files.
I'll warn you ahead of time, using these tools can be very time
consuming and tedious, but they do work.  Very well.

Good luck.

- gjk