Fat32 hard drive locked down by EFI

In my system I have a hard drive (sdc) which is formatted to fat32.
Since upgrading to 12.3, I can no longer access the files. So I looked at it with partition editor, and the label has been changed to Boot and there is a folder inside the partition called EFI
Is there a way of getting to my original files.?

Sounds like it had been formatted during installation. If this is what happened - you need professional data recovery service to get data back.

May be devices got different order in new version, and your original data is on different disk?

On 2013-04-19 20:06, arvidjaar wrote:
>
> Sounds like it had been formatted during installation. If this is what
> happened - you need professional data recovery service to get data back.

Try with testdisk and photorec. Read docs first.

> May be devices got different order in new version, and your original
> data is on different disk?

That’s a hope.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)

Over the last couple of days, I have been figuring out testdisk and photorec. Although I have managed to change the partition table - destroyed it and got it back, I still don’t have access to the files. photorec gave me a million or two files, so i gave up that one.
To me, this efi thing should never have happened in the first place, as I did not invoke any windows type options on installation. There was no windows boot system on my machine.
It does not matter about the files, as they were not important, but I am still trying other solutions so that I can learn and understand.
I will now try fdisk and see if it can read the file system or recreate the partition table.

On 2013-04-23 22:06, Alastairo wrote:
>
> Over the last couple of days, I have been figuring out testdisk and
> photorec. Although I have managed to change the partition table -
> destroyed it and got it back, I still don’t have access to the files.
> photorec gave me a million or two files, so i gave up that one.

Maybe those tools are not up to date with GPT partitions, which I guess
you got changed to.

> To me, this efi thing should never have happened in the first place, as
> I did not invoke any windows type options on installation. There was no
> windows boot system on my machine.

Having EFI boot system is not related to having Windows or not.

I have no idea why this happened; maybe the installation logs would say.
They are in “/var/log/YaST2/”, so if you want to find out what happened,
copy that directory somewhere else because the logs are rotated and
eventually deleted.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)

On 2013-04-19 18:06, Alastairo wrote:>
> In my system I have a hard drive (sdc) which is formatted to fat32.
> Since upgrading to 12.3, I can no longer access the files. So I looked
> at it with partition editor, and the label has been changed to Boot and
> there is a folder inside the partition called EFI
> Is there a way of getting to my original files.?

On 2013-04-23 23:33, Carlos E. R. wrote:

> I have no idea why this happened; maybe the installation logs would say.
> They are in “/var/log/YaST2/”, so if you want to find out what happened,
> copy that directory somewhere else because the logs are rotated and
> eventually deleted.

I just saw a post related to
this post here

I refer to this paragraph:

> There were some educating moments: the live install really wanted me to delete all the partitions,
> because the hard disk needded a label (GPT, or something like that). I figured it is just because
> the live install detected the pendrive as a candidate hardware for the /boot. My first install was
> a full DVD one, which obviouly didn’t have to deal with this matter of choice.

If this can be confirmed and reproduced, it would be a nasty bug.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)

When I installed (KDE DVD image) with a pen drive the defaults wanted to install to the pen. I was going to use advanced anyway so it was not a problem but it could be for some one that does not understand what they are doing or does not look at the partition scheme. I think the problem is the pen looks like a normal boot drive while a DVD/CD does not.

That is right! I found this out while trying to set up my system to boot off the pen drive and the swap, root and home partitions on an extended partition on a non-bootable external drive.

PrakashC