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How to recover a /home partition marked as unallocated

Swarfendor437

Tue Nov 06, 2018 10:57:12 pm

OK, new motherboard, old drive, /home (of Zorin Lite 12.4) marked / identified as 'unallocated' space in GParted! Scratched head and remembered reading somewhere that Gparted comes with Test Disk (this might be the live version, not sure) so I began looking at the options. Before going any further you may well need a live version of GParted if you don't have another drive with another GNU/Linux installed on it. The scenario I am sharing is a drive with Feren OS which has GParted installed, but I discovered when first attempting to check for filesystems on the drive affected there was a package missing, 'gpart' - you may need to install this. I did it through the terminal:

Code:
sudo apt-get install gpart


Now read on:

1.
Zorin home unallocated.jpg


Here you can see the drive that contains:

sda1 - '/' root partition
sda2 - 'unallocated' (actually '/home' - so potentially a partition table error/something else/failing drive.)
sda 3 - ntfs data share partition - I also backed this up - just in case - using the data recovery through GParted.
Next we go to the 'Device' heading in the menu bar of GParted and select 'Attempt Data Rescue ...' shown below.

2.
Data Rescue.jpg


You will then receive this notification:

3.
Search for filesystems.jpg


You are advised it may take some time but for me was very quick because of the new rig (Ryzen 7 with 16 Gb RAM).

4.
File Systems Found.jpg

In this scenario, you cannot view the 'root' filesystem (#1) as it is protected file system being 'root' and we need to recover the '/home' partition, which is #2 ...

5.
home folder to recover.jpg


I then simply dragged the 'swarfendor437' folder onto my external drive so I am now safe in the knowledge I can reinstall Zorin (hopefully!) and to play extra safe, filesystem #3 was the NTFS system partition for Data Sharing I created a tutorial video for before installing any GNU/Linux so you can access data both from GNU/Linux and your Windows machines (or smartphone using Obmin installed in Zorin).

[Footnote: having looked at the images supplied I spotted an instant error - my NTFS data share partition is marked as Bootable - changed the Zorin '/' partition to be marked as bootable and on booting get the Windows 'Missing Operating System' - this is what comes when you don't follow your own advice (I could cry like Alice in Wonderland - but won't! :lol: ) of disconnecting drives you are not working on!]

pcfan5

Wed Nov 07, 2018 10:51:06 pm

good to know! thanks!

terry

Fri Dec 07, 2018 6:58:48 pm

Many thanks!