Newbie: Mint Crashed While Installing alongside Win XP on D:\. Now Can't Access D in Windows

Pictures are great... but I don't think they are saying anything more than my summary, or point it out for me.

So, let's take one at a time. The Samsung is most important, right? You have not lost anything there (that we can identify) as it is a healthy drive running your current Windows 7. This is your only working Windows. For maximum protection, you could remove this drive and set it aside for now.
 


Are there any discrepancies or other questions about the Samsung?
 
If I have a long pause, I may have to go help a coworker for awhile, but I'll probably be back while still at work.
 
Are there any discrepancies or other questions about the Samsung?

It's all good. I sent the screen shots because I wanted you to see what I was seeing, not because I disagreed with your summary but because I'm learning as we go and prone to mistakes until I get my old brain wrapped around this stuff. :confused: You're doing great, my friend, and thanks again for your time. I have an errand to run, but I'll be back in about an hour and pull the Samsung drive. Good idea.
 
It's all good. I sent the screen shots because I wanted you to see what I was seeing, not because I disagreed with your summary but because I'm learning as we go and prone to mistakes until I get my old brain wrapped around this stuff. :confused: You're doing great, my friend, and thanks again for your time. I have an errand to run, but I'll be back in about an hour and pull the Samsung drive. Good idea.
You're doing great here too... I know that it's hard to understand hard drive assignments in the beginning. The screen shots are verifying everything that you wrote yesterday that I based my summary on, and you were very thorough with your descriptions.

I'll be gone an hour also, maybe even a little more, but not too much. See you then.
 
I'm back, if you want to chat more. I've got a couple of hours free then have to get some things done at the end of the shift.
 
You're doing great here too... I know that it's hard to understand hard drive assignments in the beginning. The screen shots are verifying everything that you wrote yesterday that I based my summary on, and you were very thorough with your descriptions.

I'll be gone an hour also, maybe even a little more, but not too much. See you then.

Thanks for the encouragement.

I have unplugged the data cable for the Samsung drive from the motherboard, (SATA2) and set the new WD 1 TB drive into am empty bay, plugged the power and data cables into the drive, but left it unplugged from the motherboard. So it's ready to go if needed.

Just to be clear about the drives now that I've unplugged the Samsung:

/dev/sda is WD 1.5 with two partitions: /sda1 1.5 TB Linux Bootable, est4 -- not mounted; /sda 11 MB of unallocated space.

/dev/sdb1 is Sandisk pen drive with Mint installed.

/dev/sdc is Seagate GoFlex with two partitions: /sdc1 617 GB HPFS/NTFS (Bootable) NTFS -- not mounted; /sdc2 1.4 TB Linux ext4 -- Mounted at /media/mint/Linux1
 
I don't know if it matters, but just in case, the drive info above is from "Disks" and to be clear, the two apps, Gparted and /Menu/Accessories/Disks, report drive info differently, in that "Disks" reports /sda1 (size) 1.5 TB, and Gparted reports (size) 1.36 TB 22.12 GB (used) 1.34 TB (unused). I realize the Gparted numbers add up to approx. 1.5 TB, but just in case you need to know there is some used space on the drive being reported, which I didn't mention in my last post. Hope I'm not making this harder than it has to be. :rolleyes:
 
Oops, was going to jump back in sooner but had a visitor.

Okay, /dev/sda didn't change, but the others moved up a notch. Makes sense, right?

With the Samsung now removed, there can be no mixup to corrupt or damage it. Any other questions about that one?

If not, let's confirm the WD, /dev/sda. I think you just said it has 2 partitions, but without me looking back (hard on my phone)... I think there is only one partition... Linux. The unallocated space is not a partition and has no /dev/sda#. Right?

I think you said this was formerly Windows XP, but there is no NTFS partition, so Windows is gone. You probably did that when installing Linux.

You hoped to recover email and/or other data here, but that is not likely without expensive professional forensic data recovery. Formatting to Linux did not necessarily destroy all the data, but where it wrote 22 GB, those blocks are likely gone for good. There are some tools that can "undelete" in some cases, but I am doubtful in this situation, except maybe for a professional.

Let me pause here for you to comment.
 
Gotta go do a little more work, but should have a bit more free time before the end of my shift. Easy day today... wish they were always like that!:cool::D
 
Oops, was going to jump back in sooner but had a visitor.

Okay, /dev/sda didn't change, but the others moved up a notch. Makes sense, right?

With the Samsung now removed, there can be no mixup to corrupt or damage it. Any other questions about that one?

If not, let's confirm the WD, /dev/sda. I think you just said it has 2 partitions, but without me looking back (hard on my phone)... I think there is only one partition... Linux. The unallocated space is not a partition and has no /dev/sda#. Right?

I think you said this was formerly Windows XP, but there is no NTFS partition, so Windows is gone. You probably did that when installing Linux.

You hoped to recover email and/or other data here, but that is not likely without expensive professional forensic data recovery. Formatting to Linux did not necessarily destroy all the data, but where it wrote 22 GB, those blocks are likely gone for good. There are some tools that can "undelete" in some cases, but I am doubtful in this situation, except maybe for a professional.

Let me pause here for you to comment.

Yes, it makes sense they would move up.

No more questions about the Samsung for now. It's safe. :)

No, the WD 1.5 TB had my original Win 7 installation when Windows update crashed it, not XP. I'm sure XP was installed on the Samsung, and you thought it was also installed on the Seagate USB drive because of the brief XP logo that flashed when I tried to boot to it.

If I can't get anything back from the WD /dev/sda, that's fine. I'm more concerned about the data on the Samsung. So we can format /sda if necessary.

Here's a couple screen shots of Gparted and "Disk." I'm not sure what it's telling us about /sda and /sda1.

In this shot, notice that in Gparted, the ext4 drive appears to be listed as sda in the drop down list, and when you select it, it lists the ext4 partition as /sda1 . Also note that in the "Disks" app, the 1.5 TB partition is also listed as /sda1
Screenshot from 2018-01-21 15-15-14.png





In this shot, I highlighted the "free space" (green) in "Disks" and it is listed as /sda, while the 1.36 TB ext4 partition is listed as /sda1, in both apps.



Screenshot from 2018-01-21 15-15-36.png
 
Gotta go do a little more work, but should have a bit more free time before the end of my shift. Easy day today... wish they were always like that!:cool::D

No problem Stan. I'm patient. Thanks for your time. Glad you had an easy day at work. Enjoy your evening. :cool:
 
Back for a little, then off to dinner with friends.

Oops, yes, WD was the Win 7 before update. But no NTFS partition still means there is nothing to recover without extreme effort.

Reviewing your pics some more, I am also worried about your Seagate external. You may not be able to get any backup data from it either, but let's go slow and try to figure it out.

The difference in capacity between Gparted and the Disks app isn't critical. Windows would probably give even different numbers.

But stick with Gparted and compare your WD and your Seagate. You see the color difference between NTFS and ext4. You see that only a real partition has an assignment, like /dev/sda#. Partitions must be formatted with a filesystem, NTFS or ext4 or FAT32 or others (including SWAP space... more later on that).

You can see the light yellow highlight that indicates how much of a partition is used, and the white space is unused space on the drive. And you can see the unallocated space as the tiny little section that looks like a partition, it might be a gray or other dull color.... this space is not a partition, but it is still part of the drive, so you see /dev/sda with no number. Gparted clearly identifies each partition and it's assigned number.

But your Seagate does not show any of the yellow highlight in the NTFS partition. And it goes not give any info on how much is used and how much is unused.... only the full size of the partition. So when I said earlier to copy this to the WD, I now think that will not work. We have to consider this. The error report said to run chkdsk on it and reboot twice. We may do that, but let's take a break from it for a bit and think about it. There are many tools available, including Gparted, but best not to rush.

Looking at the failed Linux installs, a couple of things stand out. 1) Neither drive shows a partition with SWAP space. It is common to create the swap space and you must have neglected this during the install both times. Windows uses swap space too... it's a overflow bucket if the RAM gets full. 2) Your "mount point" starts off like, /media/mint.... and so on. This is very uncommon and may also be party of the failure to boot. The typical mount point for Linux is simply "/” (without quotes). I'd guess you left the mount point empty... I didn't know it will let you do that, but that's my guess.

But, drives are mounted to the /media folder sometimes too. Your pen drive and Seagate would probably "auto-mount" there when you plug them in. This is a different scenario than trying to install a working Linux to a hard drive though. Just more to think about and more for you to learn.

With that, if I'm not rambling yet, I soon will be. And I haven't had any beer yet! :eek::eek::D

Catch you again tomorrow. Maybe my Wizard friend will pop in with some better wisdom.

Cheers
 
Maybe my Wizard friend will pop in with some better wisdom.

Hardly think I could do better than you here, Stan :D

A couple of observations, though, for the benefit of the OP (Original Poster, @Gomad ) and for The Viewers whom may not know.

1. Screenshots are legend for helping purposes, goodonyer, keep 'em up :)

2, To save you paging back, a couple of points on two of them, from #18, I have repeated here, cropped in part to relevant parts:

Uo5DDKy.png

Screenshot 1: GParted & Disks - Seagate

Note the orange-yellow (let's call it mustard or ochre) icon with the small "i" in the centre. Right-click that and it will tell you information, likely of a fault, you can report its content if you like.

2j7A5zX.png


Screenshot 2: Gparted & Disks - this is actually your first screenshot, of the Western Digital.

The 1.36 TiB reported by GParted, is, in fact, the 1.5TB reported by Disks.

If you Google up "tebibyte terabyte" likely first result is from Wikipedia here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebibyte

It is worth getting to understand the difference. This is a standard that has actually been in place for about 10 years, cross-platform, but many Windows users are unaware of it, and the computer manufacturers ignore it and round figures off even more.

So there are kibibytes, mebibytes, gibibytes and tebibytes.

The conversion rate from Terabyte to Tebibyte is 1 Terabyte = 0.909495 Tebibytes.

So

VoX2Jsy.png


Screenshot 3: 1.5 TB = 1.36 TiB

I have to scoot, back later.

But @Gomad , not being at all condescending nor patronising, you are doing really well, and I expect you will soon be enjoying your Linux just as we do :D;)

Cheers

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
 
Stan, I thought we were through for the day, so I had a beer. Sorry for rubbing that in. LoL

But thanks for the comments. I really don't want you to stress about this, because I'm not. I've gotten over the shock and anger at Microsoft for (IMO, intentionally) boinking my HD thinking I would upgrade to Win 10 (silly them), and I'm very grateful for all of your time that you've given to trying to help me solve my problems so I can flush Windows to the "aromic park" where it belongs. So thank you again, and please, have a beer. Maybe two. I would gladly buy them for you if I could.

I agree with everything you've said above. I did not setup a bootloader nor did I create a swap space, since I don't ever recall having to do so in the past. I clicked on the "Install Linux" icon, and figured it would prompt me if there was anything I needed to do. And that's my story and I'm sticking to it. :D

Frankly, I'm not too worried about what may be on either the Seagate, or the WD. If the data is toast, so be it. Nothing there that I can't live without. However, the Samsung is the one I really want to resurrect, if possible, when we're done with this debacle.

So with that said, let the carnage begin! o_O
 
Hardly think I could do better than you here, Stan :D

A couple of observations, though, for the benefit of the OP (Original Poster, @Gomad ) and for The Viewers whom may not know.

1. Screenshots are legend for helping purposes, goodonyer, keep 'em up :)

2, To save you paging back, a couple of points on two of them, from #18, I have repeated here, cropped in part to relevant parts:

Uo5DDKy.png

Screenshot 1: GParted & Disks - Seagate

Note the orange-yellow (let's call it mustard or ochre) icon with the small "i" in the centre. Right-click that and it will tell you information, likely of a fault, you can report its content if you like.

2j7A5zX.png


Screenshot 2: Gparted & Disks - this is actually your first screenshot, of the Western Digital.

The 1.36 TiB reported by GParted, is, in fact, the 1.5TB reported by Disks.

If you Google up "tebibyte terabyte" likely first result is from Wikipedia here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebibyte

It is worth getting to understand the difference. This is a standard that has actually been in place for about 10 years, cross-platform, but many Windows users are unaware of it, and the computer manufacturers ignore it and round figures off even more.

So there are kibibytes, mebibytes, gibibytes and tebibytes.

The conversion rate from Terabyte to Tebibyte is 1 Terabyte = 0.909495 Tebibytes.

So

VoX2Jsy.png


Screenshot 3: 1.5 TB = 1.36 TiB

I have to scoot, back later.

But @Gomad , not being at all condescending nor patronising, you are doing really well, and I expect you will soon be enjoying your Linux just as we do :D;)

Cheers

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz

Wiz, thanks for checking in with that info. Every piece of the puzzle helps me to understand. Some people can look at one corner of a Picasso and conceptualize the rest, but I'm a visual person. I need to see the whole picture first. And thanks for the encouragement, I think screen shots are a very valuable tool as well.
 
Stan, I thought we were through for the day, so I had a beer. Sorry for rubbing that in. LoL

But thanks for the comments. I really don't want you to stress about this, because I'm not. I've gotten over the shock and anger at Microsoft for (IMO, intentionally) boinking my HD thinking I would upgrade to Win 10 (silly them), and I'm very grateful for all of your time that you've given to trying to help me solve my problems so I can flush Windows to the "aromic park" where it belongs. So thank you again, and please, have a beer. Maybe two. I would gladly buy them for you if I could.

I agree with everything you've said above. I did not setup a bootloader nor did I create a swap space, since I don't ever recall having to do so in the past. I clicked on the "Install Linux" icon, and figured it would prompt me if there was anything I needed to do. And that's my story and I'm sticking to it. :D

Frankly, I'm not too worried about what may be on either the Seagate, or the WD. If the data is toast, so be it. Nothing there that I can't live without. However, the Samsung is the one I really want to resurrect, if possible, when we're done with this debacle.

So with that said, let the carnage begin! o_O

It was rough... let's just say, "more than 2" were consumed, and more than beer. My head hurts! :eek::D

I've had some data losses over the years too, and it is never a fun experience. I'm glad you're ready to move forward, but let me hold out one last possibility for you, although you may still decide against this. The "professional data recovery" is usually too expensive for most of us, but there are some tools (for both Windows and Linux) that can recover data from drives and partitions that have been reformatted, and even changed filesystems. I used one such product many years ago and had some success... but it wasn't pretty. In my case, it did not recover the file names for the things it found... so I was given a folder full of .jpg files, and a folder full of .doc files... and each one had to be opened to figure out what it was and renamed to something sensible. This became a nightmare task on its own, and still many files were damaged and only partly usable, and many files were still totally lost.

I don't know the current status of these kinds of products, and whether the file names could be salvaged. But these are complicated tools and you may decide quickly to give up on this idea and "let the carnage begin" anyway. So you can see what I'm talking about though, a pair of popular tools (although not updated for a few years now) are PhotoRec and TestDisk. When I remembered these types of programs, I thought I should at least mention them to you, but I'm afraid they might be over your head. (I don't mean that as a put-down, they might be over my head too!) But the links do offer an introduction to how files are stored and how they can possibly be recovered if they have not been overwritten with other data.

You mention recovering stuff from the Samsung, which is out of the game for now, when we get the other drives cleaned up and back to normal.... which to me will be to get Linux working on the WD and to clear the errors and make the Seagate a good functioning external backup for all of your needs. If you want to pursue the data recovery of the WD and/or Seagate, you could use the new WD as a place to store any recovered files. If you decide to skip that, we still want to consider the damage to the Seagate and whether we can get anything from that NTFS partition.... or if you decide that you will write it off as a loss also. If you want to run chkdsk to as a first attempt to fix the NTFS partition, you'll need to put the Samsung back in since it's the only drive using Windows, and chkdsk is a Windows tool.

If you decide to skip chkdsk, you can also try to use Gparted to repair that partition. It might work, or might not. If it can be repaired, then you might find files there that you want to keep. In that case, you might also want to use the new WD to store anything that you can.

If you want to abandon any recovery options on the WD and Seagate and accept the losses, then I think the next step would be to get Linux on the WD in a working manner. So, you can consider these and let us know... and off we go!

Cheers
 
It was rough... let's just say, "more than 2" were consumed, and more than beer. My head hurts! :eek::D

I've had some data losses over the years too, and it is never a fun experience. I'm glad you're ready to move forward, but let me hold out one last possibility for you, although you may still decide against this. The "professional data recovery" is usually too expensive for most of us, but there are some tools (for both Windows and Linux) that can recover data from drives and partitions that have been reformatted, and even changed filesystems. I used one such product many years ago and had some success... but it wasn't pretty. In my case, it did not recover the file names for the things it found... so I was given a folder full of .jpg files, and a folder full of .doc files... and each one had to be opened to figure out what it was and renamed to something sensible. This became a nightmare task on its own, and still many files were damaged and only partly usable, and many files were still totally lost.

I don't know the current status of these kinds of products, and whether the file names could be salvaged. But these are complicated tools and you may decide quickly to give up on this idea and "let the carnage begin" anyway. So you can see what I'm talking about though, a pair of popular tools (although not updated for a few years now) are PhotoRec and TestDisk. When I remembered these types of programs, I thought I should at least mention them to you, but I'm afraid they might be over your head. (I don't mean that as a put-down, they might be over my head too!) But the links do offer an introduction to how files are stored and how they can possibly be recovered if they have not been overwritten with other data.

You mention recovering stuff from the Samsung, which is out of the game for now, when we get the other drives cleaned up and back to normal.... which to me will be to get Linux working on the WD and to clear the errors and make the Seagate a good functioning external backup for all of your needs. If you want to pursue the data recovery of the WD and/or Seagate, you could use the new WD as a place to store any recovered files. If you decide to skip that, we still want to consider the damage to the Seagate and whether we can get anything from that NTFS partition.... or if you decide that you will write it off as a loss also. If you want to run chkdsk to as a first attempt to fix the NTFS partition, you'll need to put the Samsung back in since it's the only drive using Windows, and chkdsk is a Windows tool.

If you decide to skip chkdsk, you can also try to use Gparted to repair that partition. It might work, or might not. If it can be repaired, then you might find files there that you want to keep. In that case, you might also want to use the new WD to store anything that you can.

If you want to abandon any recovery options on the WD and Seagate and accept the losses, then I think the next step would be to get Linux on the WD in a working manner. So, you can consider these and let us know... and off we go!

Cheers

Stan, as long as you didn't hug the "porcelain bus" then you probably had a good time last night. ha ha But everything comes with a price, no? :D

Thanks for the recovery info, but it sounds like it requires more patience than I have at the moment. I have over 10,000 pictures, videos and documents on the Samsung that I would like to recover, so if we can't get that data back later, I may attempt one of the solutions you mentioned above, but only on the Samsung drive if necessary. But I've already bit the bullet in my mind about the WD and the Goflex, so I'm ready to start "rippety-gouging." (seems to be what I do best lol) I like your plan to use the Goflex as a backup drive and put Linux on the WD, so with no further ado, let's roll. :D

Question: I would like to setup the WD to run several different versions of Linux, so I can play and learn without boinking my proprietary system. What does that require? Just separate partitions?

I have to admit that I blew off the checksum verification for the .iso I downloaded because I was so new that I couldn't make "clear" sense of the instructions, and I was in dire straits and trigger shy after failing to recover my WD drive from the crash, but I have found a tutorial that even I can understand, and I really need to do this before we proceed, so I'll be gone, hopefully only for a few minutes to plug my Samsung back in (because that's where the .iso I downloaded is saved, and try to run the Windows checksum utility. Unless I boink that process, I'll be back soon. Cross your fingers, eyes, whatever...
 
Stan, I was successful verifying the checksum of my Mint .iso. (crowd roar) The Samsung is unplugged again, I'm running Mint, so I think all systems are go for re-entry.
 
Stan, as long as you didn't hug the "porcelain bus" then you probably had a good time last night. ha ha But everything comes with a price, no? :D

Thanks for the recovery info, but it sounds like it requires more patience than I have at the moment. I have over 10,000 pictures, videos and documents on the Samsung that I would like to recover, so if we can't get that data back later, I may attempt one of the solutions you mentioned above, but only on the Samsung drive if necessary. But I've already bit the bullet in my mind about the WD and the Goflex, so I'm ready to start "rippety-gouging." (seems to be what I do best lol) I like your plan to use the Goflex as a backup drive and put Linux on the WD, so with no further ado, let's roll. :D

Question: I would like to setup the WD to run several different versions of Linux, so I can play and learn without boinking my proprietary system. What does that require? Just separate partitions?

I have to admit that I blew off the checksum verification for the .iso I downloaded because I was so new that I couldn't make "clear" sense of the instructions, and I was in dire straits and trigger shy after failing to recover my WD drive from the crash, but I have found a tutorial that even I can understand, and I really need to do this before we proceed, so I'll be gone, hopefully only for a few minutes to plug my Samsung back in (because that's where the .iso I downloaded is saved, and try to run the Windows checksum utility. Unless I boink that process, I'll be back soon. Cross your fingers, eyes, whatever...

Hey Steve! I may be too late (not a big deal) but Wizard developed a method to "verify" that your USB used a good .iso. But now that you have a handle on the process, it will be easier to use the regular method as you are now on your way to do.

OK... we will write off the data losses to Mr. Gates and his evil brood, and move on. Question any steps as we go if you have any uncertainty, but I'll try to explain things (with way too many words, as usual, probably).

You've been running on the Linux USB and it seems fine. You will have it verified shortly which gives even more confidence. We will use that to install the same Linux Mint on to the WD drive. And you want to install other Linux distros on to the same drive a little later.... can do. We're going to have to get you familiar with the Linux installer, or Gparted, or both, so that you become intimate with partitions and drive assignments. You will soon teach this class! :cool::D

Let's do this "the easy way" first. This could be your final and finished Mint installation, or we can remove and do-over to explore this process more fully so you understand it all better.

I'd unplug your GoFlex drive for now, and I think all the other hard drives are unplugged... so just the WD will be available. We will boot on the Linux USB, double-click the Install Linux Mint icon on the desktop, and have it use the entire WD hard disk to install Linux Mint. I just ran through a quick install, so if I took good notes, there are only 7 steps:

1. Pick and language. Click continue.

2. Connect to wireless network (not required for install). Click continue.

3. Install 3rd party software. Usually a good idea, so check the box and click continue.

4. Installation Type: choose "Erase disk and install Mint" then click the Install Now button. Do not select encryption or LVM. On another install later (if I can get you to do-over) we will go for "something else" at this stage. But the "easy way" is just to erase disk and do a full install. This lets you skip the SWAP questions and where to put the bootloader.

5. Pick your Time Zone and click continue.

6. Pick your keyboard layouts and click continue.

7. Who are you? Enter your first name (with a capital letter), and it will automatically fill in the user name with a lower case letter... normal. The computer name is what would be seen on a local home network, but it also shows up in your command line as user@computer.... so a short name here is nice, like hp, dell, acer, or can be anything you want. Enter your password and then again to confirm it. I choose to log in automatically here at home, but if you don't choose this you will have to enter your password every time you boot and log on. Do not encrypt the home folder. Click continue.

And.... wait for it. When finished, it will prompt you to remove the USB and restart. It should boot up on Mint without using your BIOS Boot Menu. Fingers crossed! :D:D
 

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