I was trying to make a live usb with my Ubuntu laptop using http://www.syncwithtech.org/2013/07/opensuse-bootable-usb.html That guide. I somehow managed to mess things up pretty bad. Not only does the usb not work but when I start my laptop instead of booting Ubuntu like normal it boots the openSUSE installation screen (the usb I was trying to make into a live usb was never connected to my laptop when I booted it). I tried all of the options one the first installation screen, the Boot from Hard Disk option just goes to a screen that says : Booting from local disk… Boot failed: press a key to retry… After that it just re-boots to the installation screen. All of the other options just produce a bunch of code to fast to read then a message that says Rebooting in 90 seconds…_ After that it too re-boots to the installation screen. Does anyone have any idea what I did and any way to fix it short of re-installing Ubuntu?
Sounds like you managed to copy the iso not to the USB but to the hard drive this will wipe the exiting partition table plus most everything at the beginning of the drive. Using recovery software maybe you can recover some of the files but the system is toast
The instruction are correct on that web page so I suspect you used /dev/sda instead of the file where the USB shows up on your machine as was instructed.
On 2015-08-21 17:56, pahixirm wrote:
> Does anyone have any idea what I did and
> any way to fix it short of re-installing Ubuntu?
Oh, my.
From what you described, you copied the installation media not to the
usb stick, but to your main disk, destroying it.
If you had valuable data there, it is possible to recover whatever is
beyond the first gigabyte (if you used the CD sized live) or beyond the
5th gigabyte. It is far from trivial to do it, so you’d have to hire an
expensive recovery company to do it.
Well, actually, not that difficult. The first partition and the
partition table are lost, but the rest of the partitions are probably
safe. Ask again and I’ll try to describe options.
If the data is not valuable, or you have backups, then just reinstall
Ubuntu or whatever system you’d like.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
That’s what I was afraid of, I there are only a few files I’ll miss. Looks like I’m going to have to reinstall.
On 2015-08-22 17:06, pahixirm wrote:
>
> That’s what I was afraid of, I there are only a few files I’ll miss.
> Looks like I’m going to have to reinstall.
If they are in a partition beyond the start of the disk, they are
recoverable.
The procedure is first to recover the partition table. There is a tool
for this: gpart:
DESCRIPTION
gpart tries to guess which partitions are on a hard disk. If the
primary partition table has been lost, overwritten or destroyed the
partitions still exist on the disk but the operating system cannot
access them.
gpart ignores the primary partition table and scans the disk (or
disk image, file) sector after sector for several filesystem/partition
types. It does so by “asking” filesystem recognition modules if they
think a given sequence of sectors resembles the beginning of a
filesystem or partition type. Currently the following filesystem types
are known to gpart (listed by module names) :
So, you can try. If it finds them, you can reconstruct the table quite
easily. However, the tool was designed for traditional partitions: I
don’t know how to recover GPT disks, but it should be even easier, the
table is replicated at the end, I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
GPT also provides redundancy, writing the GPT header and partition table
both at the beginning and at the end of the disk.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)