Trusty Testdisk

I have had the honour of using testdisk many times in Windows. An excellent tool to restore partition tables and deal with other issues that can occur in the critical sections of a partition, Testdisk is god-incarnate.

I found out that it can also play saviour in Linux, thanks to its multiplatform nature.

The XP installation, previously mentioned, being on the C: drive could be easily included in the grub menu by adding "chainloader +1" and "makeactive" terms, to the grub menu. but since C: drive being the only primary partition on the drive, I wanted to shift XP to another partition. Post installation, I was confronted with a "disk error" message.

Reverting back to the grub menu (since the reinstallation again wiped grub) I loaded PCLinux, and did an fsck on the drive. fsck indicated that the partition table differed from its backup and offered to restore the backup. After permitting this, I reran fsck, and was dismayed to find that the restoring had not succeeded. This is when I remembered test disk.

Since PCLinux had consistently failed to install any new program through the application manager (always ending with an "cannot access rpm database" error), I loaded OPensuse to try to install Testdisk. First I downloaded the RPM (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download) and double clicked on it. The application manager flashed briefly and then nothing. Then I tried using the application manager to include testdisk from the repositories. On doing a search I discovered that testdisk was already installed.

How can one be sure that an application is installed, if it does not make an appearance in any menu? Run the command from the console. I did this and was presented with the familiar testdisk textbased interface. A little browsing was needed to get to the required menu, on running the tool to check the parition, it reported that the original and backup differed. Then I restored the backup, and reran the tool to confirm. This time the backup was successfully restore.

On a reboot and reentering the grub menu, I was able to boot into the fresh XP installation.