On my home PC, I’ve had the following partitions on a 1 TB SSD:
EFI
64 GB swap
32 GB Manjaro /
64 GB Manjaro /home
empty space
500 GB /data
Since my 32 GB / was full, I booted to another Linux Desktop using a boot stick. There I used the KDE Partition Manager to:
move /home by 32 GB
increment / by 32 GB
But the program failed, and it resulted that both, / and /home were lost (displayed as empty partitions). I’ve tried to boot, but unsuccessfully. I ran the gparted data rescue from the boot stick for more than 12h, but no data was found.
Most of the data saved on /data, but there is still some important data left on those partitions. Is there another possibility to get back these data?
Since I know where the old partitions sectors were, can I manually set a partition without losing the data on it?
Thankfully, I have my work laptop I can use as a workaround, but it would be nice to use my PC again. I hope some can help me quick.
testdisk from Manjaro extra repository might recover some of the data, but that will probably take a long time and it can create a lot of partially recovered fragments
If you do not have much free space on /data partition I would suggest recovering data from /home partition to an external USB drive if possible
You DID take a backup of your data BEFORE you went playing with partitions ? If yes (I’m sure, you did eh), simply restore your data from the backup and be done…
Cheers,
Eddy
I used Testdisk in the past to recover data from a partition.
Be aware though, that anything you do will damage data on the disk - by the time I recovered some 600 photos I’d stored (in 2007) about 20% of them were damaged files.
Best plan - boot Manjaro from USB, then plug in a HDD, and use Testdisk to recover what you can.
After today, with a 1TB SSD in the machine, you need to work out how to backup before doing any partition work. I think I would have been inclined to do a ‘Timeshift’ rsync backup to a HDD, and then copied any personal data to a backup folder, before just installing to the whole 1TB space with no partitions… then restoring the snapshot and copying back folders.
I will try testdisk this evening and hope I get some data back.
And no I didn’t made a backup of the data in /home, since I store almost all important files on /data, which is the partition I back up frequently.
When I did some bigger partition edits some time ago, I backed up the partitions just in case. But I thought for just some small changes nothing should break and ignored that. But now I’ve learned my lesson.
I will reply again with an update in about 12h when I’m back home and tried testdisk. Thanks again!
If you know the exact partition layout - e.g. you dumped the partition table to file - you can restore that layout.
Moving a partition involves an exorbitant amount of free space - it is not just move.
Resizing a partition to the right - extending - is usually safe - but moving a partition is almost never safe - especially if it contains a lot of data.
Your best option is to
use dd to create an image of the disk and place it on a secondary disk for safe keeping.
cut your losses
that is
remove the home partition
extend your root partition
set it’s partition type guid to 8304 Linux x86-64 root (/)
create a new home partition using cgdisk
set it’s partition type guid to 8302 Linux /home
comment reference in fstab to root and home (don’t worry - system will find and moun anyway)
Restore your home data from your backup
When your desktop is back up - you can decide on further action.
You can mount the img file using loop device and do forensic recovery on the mounted image.
That sounds interesting. I will do it this evening.
Since I know that I configured exactly 32 GiB and 64 GiB for / and /home, I think I can export the current table to a file, edit it to match the previous sectors and import it again should work, right?
Thanks for the explanation, I’ll try to remember it.