I probably destroyed my computer

[Pekin]

Hello everyone, I was using the x86_64 live installation disk from a usb, on an nv53a laptop, and selected the 'shrink current system' option. After I agreed to write changes to disk, I later got an error after it tried to resize my ntfs partition... Then it crashed and my computer restarted. As of now, I cannot access the partition anymore, my windows installation disk will not recognize any current installation of windows, and of course, windows will not boot. I am currently writing this from the live media. My question is, is there ANY way to get my data back somehow? What did I do wrong?

[srs5694]

There's probably filesystem damage, and you'll need to use Windows filesystem repair tools to recover. This is not guaranteed to work, though, and you could make matters worse by trying. Thus, you should first do a low-level backup of the disk to another disk. With that done, there are some basic recovery tools available from the Windows installation media, and various third-party utilities (mostly commercial) are available. If you need help using them, your best bet is to ask on a Windows forum, since the recovery tools you need are Windows tools, not Linux tools.

If your data are extremely valuable, your best bet is to send the computer (or at least the hard disk) to a company that specializes in Windows data recovery. This will be very expensive. I don't happen to have any references handy.

What you did wrong was to trust that the partition resizing operation was 100% reliable. These operations always carry some risk, so you should always back up before attempting such an operation.

[stevea]

You'll need to boot a live media just to survey the damage.
Examine the disk. Start using tools like fdisk, gdisk or gparted (you can 'yum install' them from the live media).
Try performing fscks on any linux file systems.

You may wanna make an image backup of the drive before doing anything more. Even if the filesystems are borked you may be able to pul out files with testdisk and similar.

[george_toolan]

No, you didn't destroy your computer!

Just your HDD or rather the file system ;-)

Please check the partition table and the smart values for bad blocks which might explain the crash

fdisk -l

yum install smartmontools
smartctl -a /dev/sda

And don't write anything to the disk before you made a backup.

[landho]

Just to clarify from the previous posts if your not sure how to make the backup of your partition use the dd command ie.

dd if=/dev/sdxn of=/largedisk/myfilename

you can check the progress of this command by typing

 killall -USR1 dd

There is a program called ntfsundelete which runs under linux and might work to recover some of your files.

[george_toolan]

Just to clarify you should make the backup to another (external) drive or network drive and since the partition table might be corrupted you should backup the whole disk /dev/sda and not just one partition. And you should use dd_rescue instead of dd, because dd would stop after a read error.

[droidhacker]

Not to sound harsh, but you deserve for this to happen. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS keep a backup of all important data when you're doing dangerous operations (like running wondoze )

There's a million different data recovery utilities available for saving data from wondoze disks.
First thing you need to do is, as already mentioned to you, create a low level backup of the disk (use 'dd' to create a perfect disk image from that disk to a file on another disk), and you need to save the recovered data to a different disk from where you are recovering it.

No matter how you go about this, you will require a second disk that is LARGER in size than the original disk you are attempting to recover from.

---------- Post added at 08:07 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:03 AM ----------

Originally Posted by george_toolan

Just to clarify you should make the backup to another (external) drive or network drive and since the partition table might be corrupted you should backup the whole disk /dev/sda and not just one partition. And you should use dd_rescue instead of dd, because dd would stop after a read error.

I really doubt that he will run into a read error. The disk is borked by horking into the face of Satan, not by actual disk damage.

[anglicus]

Originally Posted by Pekin

Hello everyone, I was using the x86_64 live installation disk from a usb, on an nv53a laptop, and selected the 'shrink current system' option. After I agreed to write changes to disk, I later got an error after it tried to resize my ntfs partition... Then it crashed and my computer restarted. As of now, I cannot access the partition anymore, my windows installation disk will not recognize any current installation of windows, and of course, windows will not boot. I am currently writing this from the live media. My question is, is there ANY way to get my data back somehow? What did I do wrong?

Woth a shot here:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...ot-record.html

[Pekin]

Hey everyone, sorry for the late reply. I was waiting on my computer parts order for my first build. I was intending to install it on the laptop to get a headstart since I wanted it on my desktop. Anyway I was able to back it up and successfully recover all of my important data, which was wonderful. I just wanted to thank all of you and I appreciate all of your help; the help I've received really makes me think that Fedora will be a viable alternative. I still have many questions that aren't in the faq, so I expect to be posting here again soon.