Thought I'd have a go at installing Antix M11 again. Booted from livecd, selected the install option and continued with the wizard.

Now it didn't look the same as I remember it. My disk is setup with /dev/sda2 as root and /dev/sda3 as home. Going into the partition setup the partitions had the labels as /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3 and I couldn't set these to / and /home respectively - /home as I reuse my home partition.

The only other option was 1c which was to auto install to the entire disk. Maybe there was the option to reuse /home in there. Going into there it mentioned it was going to delete the partition table or summat like that. Anyway, after rebooting the livecd a few times and finding nothing changed I selected this option and sure enough it did start to delete my cmplete partition table. Quickly pulled the plug once I saw this. Of course now I can't boot from the hard drive and the antix live cd just sees one big partition!

Now I presume my data still resides on my hard drive but there's no partition table. Any advice on how to recover my data from /home?

And also any idea on why gparted wouldn't let me set partition labels on my disk during install? Previous install was Mandriva 2011 with ext4 on / and ext3 on /home.

Thanks!

Any advice on how to recover my data from /home?

You sound like you screwed the pooch. Maybe


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They both come with ddrescue and other recovery tools.

As far as question 2.

And also any idea on why gparted wouldn't let me set partition labels on my disk during install? Previous install was Mandriva 2011 with ext4 on / and ext3 on /home.

I was not looking over your shoulder so no idea. Good luck.

Thanks!

Looks like gpartedmagic contains the testdisk program which looks like it will give me some hope! And I have a copy of gpartedmagic on a magazine cd lying around so when I get home tonight I'll give it a go.

chrishall57 wrote:And also any idea on why gparted wouldn't let me set partition labels on my disk during install?

If I understand what you mean (and not what you say), I don't think you can do that in gparted. The gparted program only (only!) edits the partition table and optionally creates filesystems on partitions and edits partition/filesystem properties. The association between mount points (such as / and /home) and partitions (/dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3) is done elsewhere.

You can label partitions in gparted (because they are filesystem properties) but those labels usually have nothing to do with mount points. The association between partitions and mount points is totally controlled by the /etc/fstab file on your root (/) partition. The install program has to have an option that lets you set the / (root) partition or it won't work. It should also have an option that lets you set the /home partition. I think it can be confusing because of the order in which you select the association between mount points and partitions and when you run gparted.

I hope you are able to recover all of your data.

Hi BitJam,

There's a program on GPartedMagic distro called TestDisk. This finds any partitions and files if it can and gives you the ability to recover and restore files and partitions.

I found maybe 85% of my files and just copied what I needed to a USB stick.

Tis a fantastic program and distro!

Hi, testdisk is in antiX-M11 as well. (all versions)

Good to know, thanks!

Let us know how it goes with testdisk. DON'T write anything to the disk as there's a chance that more damage will be done until you recovered your data

Tis all done DeepDyze, recovered what I could / needed to USB and installed Antix using the whole disk. Still perturbed that I couldn't find where in the installer I had the option of creating a separate home partition. I used the second option 1b? to partition my drive but when I closed the partitioner the only other option I had was 1c - use the whole disk.

When you partitioned your drive, you did make a /home partition? I just tested this in Virtualbox, with sda1 as swap, sda2 as / and sda3 as /home and was able to get the custom install.

Yup, used the partitioner in the install,

/sda1 to /
/sda2 to /home
swap

Antix is running very nicely now so not going to reinstall although my use gparted to sort the partitions out the way I want them.

If I ever need to reinstall I'll try and take screenshots when I do it.

Cheers.