Partition wiped!

[GrezH]

Hi

I've been using Fedora 16 for about 3 weeks. In that time, I've had the main partition corrupted twice, each time seemingly after I've booted another OS (Once was Ubuntu which was installed on my other HDD and once Puppy Linux which was running from a Live CD).

On both occasions I never tried even to access the HDD containing Fedora, which is installed on its own HDD (sda).

I've tried to see if this is a common problem and can't really find out much else about it. I've managed to get my data back using Mini Tool Partition Manager, so there's no real "problem" as such, but it would be good to know if anyone's experienced anything like this and if so, are there any workarounds.

Cheers guys

Grez

[TimeMachine1994]

Are you sure it was your partition that is corrupted, and not your Bootloader? Sometimes booting other oses IIRC can mess that up. In which case you'd need to reset grub or get it to display your other oses.

[GrezH]

When I ram Mini tool partition manager, the partition was corrupted and I needed to recover it with the partition manager software. I had been left with what seemed to be a 524 MB partition that could be mounted from other operating systems, but the major part of the disk showed as unallocated and needed to be recovered.

[DBelton]

You have to be very careful with partition tools now. Fedora (as of F16) has started using GPT by default instead of MBR for the drive partitioning, and unless the tools you use are aware of GPT drives, you could cause a lot of corruption and data loss.

If it happens again, try booting the Fedora livecd and see what it tells you about the drive using something like gdisk.

[srs5694]

DBelton is correct, and I'll add one more point: There's an ugly and dangerous hack called a hybrid MBR that involves a sort of dual-partition-table setup, with both GPT and MBR components. Hybrid MBRs are popular on Macs and among the Hackintosh community, but if they're manipulated inappropriately, they can produce symptoms that are similar to what you describe. In the past, some Linux distributions set up hybrid MBRs whenever they created GPT disks. OpenSUSE did this for a while, but they've stopped doing so in the last few months.

Anyhow, it's conceivable that one of the partitioning tools you used set up a hybrid MBR and another got confused by this and ended up wiping out some or all of your partitions as a result. You'd need to carefully monitor your partition table at each step of the way to be sure that this was (or was not) happening.