i'm still a fan of Parted Magic. I think you can still the last free release on majorgeeks, but its $5 for the current iso.
There are about 100 command line programs that hit a lot of things you'd want for doing things offline to windows. I always figured that and a windows recovery disk would make a good pair. Not sure what anyone else thinks of it, but once I found that I stopped looking.
Create a Parted Magic LiveUSB key with Unetbootin (the ISO is less than 200 MB, so an old 256 MB flashpen will do just fine). Boot off of that and open the program named GParted. It's really straightforward, I think you'll know what to do. It will probably take a long time, because everything you have on D: has to be moved to the left.
Parted Magic is a Linux distribution, so your partitions are named differently. Your hard drives are named /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc and so on. Partitions on you hard drives are named /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 and so on.
If you only have that 500 GB HDD with those 2 partitions, C: should be /dev/sda1 and D: should be /dev/sda2.
No operating system is perfect so changing your distro won't save you if and when you get another power outage. Get a Universal Power Supply http://www.amazon.com/APC-BE550G-Back-UPS-Outlet-550VA/dp/B0019804U8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330088232&sr=8-1 I live in Ireland so you will probably find a better deal in your area.
Try photorec on the Parted Magic distro disc http://partedmagic.com to recovery your files. Parted Magic runs on RAM so won't write over your files on your hard disc drive.
Ok, get off of your computer right now. Don't do anything else on it, get a friend with another computer to come over to your house. You may be able to save some of them.
You will need that software and an external hard drive enclosure. Take the hard drive out of your computer, boot their computer with partedmagic and run the harddrive recovery program on it. Your files stay on your computer's harddrive until your computer overwrites them, all that deleting files does is make that area on your hard drive "free" for other things.
You may be able to save some of them.
I'd probably use Parted Magic, but I have 10+ years of Linux under my belt.
I'd probably boot using the live CD, use the included CloneZilla to image the drive first (so I could always roll back to this point), and then start working on the drive.
I'd try to use Gparted to look for faults in the filesystem (either that, or the command line tool fsck
)
I'd download new virus definition for ClamAV, and then delouse the laptop's hard drive with it.
Finally, I'd reformat a memory stick to make sure it was wiped clean of malware, and then download a copy of MS's delousing tool.
I'd then reboot, (with the PC disconnected from the internet so it could not use hooks in the OS to download and reinfect itself) and if I couldn't get the PC to boot in safe mode, I'd use something like UBCD4Win. While in safe mode, I'd run the MS tool to see if it would catch anything that ClamAV missed.
If the PC booted after that (making sure that the internet was still disconnected), I'd declare progress!, boot with Parted Magic again, and image the drive a second time so I could roll back to this point too.
Then connect up the internet and test the deloused laptop out.
Agreed. There are guides on how to hijack Boot Camp to install Linux, but I've always had better luck making the partitions myself with Disk Utility and then installing with rEFIt. That said, rEFIt makes things funky. Be very careful when changing partition tables or installing bootloaders, I've rendered my macbook unbootable a couple times that way. Oh, and if you do screw things up, here's the tool that saved my ass.
Do you have your VM's living on the same hard disk with the ESXi server?
If yes then you have to get the files for the VM's off somehow. I believe that parted magic can access VMFS. http://partedmagic.com/programs/
You can get parted magic here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/parted_magic.html
Once you have the files for your VM's the ESXi server can be re-installed. It's kind of a hassle entering all of the settings but it really doesn't take that long if you have everything documented.
Then you can import your VM files and everything should be good to go.
Hahahah, much unluck man. I'm sure most of us have done something similar, but I find it fun to reinstall and reconfigure everything again. Pick a different DE, different default apps, different theme, it's fun. Sucks about your data though, I assume you're looking into stuff like parted magic, a hectic lifesaver OS. Good luck.
Managing partitions in vista is very possible, just use disk management. Check this link
Should be able to repair your partitions from there. When installing ubuntu just set up a custom partition scheme when it brings you to the partition choices area, otherwise it will try and use available free space to install ubuntu to. I find it's easier to use Parted Magic to edit my partitions before an install than to use the built in editor in ubiquity.
ATA secure erase. You can do it for free with hdparm. PartedMagic has a easy-to-use GUI for a whole bunch of disk management tasks but the guy that develops it has started charging money for it.
DBAN has you covered, unless you're using an SSD in which case you want to use the inbuilt secure erase using PartedMagic. It's a few bucks, or just torrent the ISO and verify the checksum.
I've had good experiences with both Clonezilla and Mondo. Mondo is nice in that doesn't require you to unmount your partitions before making a snapshot; Clonezilla is nice in that it is available on its own disk or in the useful Parted Magic disk.
EDIT: Markdown syntax. That's what I get for not having RES on this computer.
>After DBAN-ing your machine, could you still run TAILS on it (TAILS being loaded onto a USB stick)?
Yes. Tails doesn't give even a single fuck about your hard drive, its contents, or even if it's there at all.
>Does TAILS eliminate information about PAST (DNM-related) activity on your machine when you install it?
No. Also, you shouldn't try to "install" Tails if you can avoid it. Run it off a disc or flash drive, instead.
Use DBAN to eliminate old evidence (3-pass is plenty). Note that if you're using an SSD, DBAN won't cut it - use http://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/ instead.
Anything else, just ask.
I use PartedMagic on a regular basis. It includes Clonezilla, which is a great disk to disk, or disk to image tool. It also has recover software, partition management tools along with a ton of other great utilities. Its all rolled into a nice live linux CD. Is easy to use and free.
For recovery? You might-could spend $5 for the current version of Parted Magic.
>Supported File Systems
You might also try /r/OSX, since that's what you're trying to repair.
This may be useful: GPT fdisk Tutorial. The tools it refers to are all (I believe) included in PartedMagic. (Sadly, Parted Magic is no longer free. But it is worth the $5 fee, IMO. YMMV.)
If you just want to go in and recover files, I'd boot Parted Magic instead of some full-featured LiveCD. Not only will you be root
right from the start (and thus have permissions to access everything), but it also includes gnifty utilities like hfsprescue for rescuing damaged HFS+ partitions, and partimage which lets you just copy an entire partition as a compacted image.
EDIT:
Though, it suddenly occurs to me: I don't know if you can boot PartedMagic on any given Mac. Can't hurt to try, however.
If you want to make and exact bit-for-bit copy of an install you can try Clonzilla. It's included in a live distro called Parted Magic.
You could have also used dd
, but if you already didn't know that then don't try it with important data. Clonzilla is basically a friendly front end to dd
.
If you want, you can give further special snowflake details. How big is the old disk? How big is the new disk? Want to adjust partition size? Etc.
For example, if you had 1 GiB old disk and a 1.5 GiB new disk in some cases it might make sense to just do a Clonzilla copy of the entire drive and then launch Gparted and maybe resize /home
to make it a bit larger. Clonzilla lets you copy entire disks or individual partitions. If you had 4 partitons, you could copy over /boot
first, shrink it with Gparted, /
second, make it a bit larger, /home
third, keeping it the same size, and then just manualy creating swap as the last partition.
> Disk Utility couldn't repair it
ddrescue really should have been the first step before trying this. Writing to a dying disk is extremely risky.
Overall it looks like a pretty good job considering you got everything you wanted.
The Lunarsoft Wiki is a good source of information on this topic. Using a blank destination disk (or two) and a linux boot cd like RIPLinux or Parted Magic makes the process much easier since all the software is ready to use.
One way to verify that would be to use a Linux LiveCD with NTFS support to see if the Windows partition is intact and readable. Parted Magic is a good place to start.
Your partition tables and/or mbr of that drive may have become corrupted. You could try using a live cd such as parted magic since linux is a bit more forgiving than windows with corrupted partitions. Another possible solution would be trying partition recovery software. http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/download.htm http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=downloads
This can be done quite easily. But first you should know that manipulating partitions always carries a risk so you will want to backup all of your data.
There are many free and commercial products that can do this task. The free ones I would recommend are Gparted LiveCD or Parted Magic. You can download their ISO and burn it to a disc then boot to it. You will end up with a GUI program that will allow you to easily delete the 3 extra partitions and resize the first one using all of the available space. If you have never burned an ISO before I would highly recommend ImgBurn to do the burning for you.
Put Parted Magic on one of them. This is the most useful PC rescue device I have ever used.
Use the other four as portable storage, like a normal person.
It won’t boot because the Linux kernel can’t read exfat formatted drives by default. You have to have either an ext4 formatted partition, OR you need built in support for exfat for it to work.
It’s easier to just make an ext4 partition.
you may have to use a Linux distro- such as parted magic (http://partedmagic.com) - to split the usb drive in to 2 partitions.
Make one ext4, and the other exfat.
Install the Linux distro of your choice to the ext4 partition. Make sure you install exfat-tools after you are finished setting up your Linux installation
Leave the exfat partition for portable storage.
ONLY the exfat partition will be recognized in Windows and Mac OS X.
Dude. You really shouldn't have talked to them at all.
To wipe an HDD, use DBAN. To wipe an SSD, use Parted Magic (be sure to use the SSD-specific wiping feature) .
Why would they know about any bitcoins you bought? Just write down your 12-word Electrum seed(s) for the wallet(s) that hold(s) all your coins on paper and stash the paper somewhere (which you should have already done anyway, regardless). And if you're that worried about it being suspicious that your computer is wiped, then don't wipe it - just delete everything that pertains to this stuff (Tor Browser, any bitcoin software, GPG, etc.), use CCleaner to get the other traces (if using Windows), and then use Parted Magic to wipe the free space on the drive. Obviously this carries some risks of not actually getting rid of everything, but it's likely to be good enough.
Normally I'd say get a lawyer, but for 1g of cannabis it may not be worth it. You might just have to suck it up and deal with the consequences, which probably could have been avoided if you just didn't do their job for them by talking. But that's all in the past, now. Best of luck to you, and stay safe in the future.
>All the benchmarking tools you would ever need! Bonnie++, IOzone, Hard Info, System Stability Tester, mprime, and stress.
Costs $9. Easily worth that, IMO.
For servers that DBAN won't detect storage devices on, I've had good luck with nwipe (a fork of DBAN that runs on regular linux) running in Parted Magic which is also on the Ultimate Boot CD.
You could use something like parted magic to boot up with both drives connected. Then you'll have to do some re-sizing to make room and clone your boot partition from the secondary drive over to your main drive. I'd still recommend backing up anything important on your main drive, just in case you happen to goof up and need to re-install.
By just using an SSD it would not make a evidence from a system inadmissible in court. If you have an intact image of a machine there are still plenty of other points of evidence that would allow someone to be convicted of various cyber crimes.
Now if you had a single SSD drive system that had evidence on it, and you secure deleted the SSD by using either the secure delete tool that came with it or by using a livecd linux distro that had hdparm PartedMagic, then you would destroy most of the evidence on that machine. That does not mean that a cyber crime can't be determined by using other live memory, files, network logs, pcaps, or service history that can be extracted from another machine.
I have successfully found incriminating evidence on SSD's, the only thing that would be a potential issue is if I needed to carve deleted files out of unallocated space. But I would still have system memory, MFT's, system restore, and shadow copies etc to work with (in the case of windows hosts). Even then I'd could resort to more exotic methods of data extraction using tools such as these. By using an SSD it does not make evidence on a system impossible to find or any less relevant as evidence.
I hope this clears things up a bit.
I use PartedMagic to do hard drive testing and other functions. I typically use the GSmartControl program to check the S.M.A.R.T. status and run built-in tests (short and long) on hard drives.
If it says unallocated space then there is no partition on it. Try creating a new partition in setup and then choosing that to install Windows 7 to. You might even try rebooting after creating the partition but it shouldn't be necessary.
Your new system almost certainly supports UEFI so maybe [try this].(http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=167245):
If none of that works, try burning a CD of Parted Magic and use that to delete any existing partitions and create a new NTFS volume.
Tried moving the partition up 5.91 GiB?
There are tools(if gparted cant do it) that can move partitions around.
The way I would do it is like this. Move partition, reboot into windows. Check Disk for errors. Boot into the tool again. Extend ntfs, reboot into windows. Check Disk for errors. Done.
It's a couple of days late, but Parted Magic is what we tend to use at work. It's included on most versions of Hiren's Boot CD.
It's quick and simple, and includes pretty much just the basics you need for dealing with a minor problem on a hard drive, or testing one that may be bad.
You can resize partitions without much trouble. Some versions of Windows can do this for you.
If that doesn't work, there is a popular Linux program called GParted which can (among other tasks) resize partitions. It is included with many "live" Linux distributions (ones that can run from a CD or USB drive without being installed). If you don't happen to have one handy, GParted Live or Parted Magic both offer GParted.
Back up all your data before resizing your partitions.
>I need to create a new partion.
The Ubuntu installer will do the re-partitioning, I believe, but if you want to do it seperately, I recommend Parted Magic.
At a minimum, you need two new partitions. One for Ubuntu, one for swap. You probably want an 8 GB swap partition. (It doesn't matter how much RAM you have, you should always have a swap partition.)
Though, on the whole I don't recommend dual-booting, for a number of reasons. One, re-booting a computer is a time-consuming PITA. You ain't going to do it unless you really need to, so you'll inevitably end up just doing everything in one OS. Two, since you probably are already comfortable with Windows, and since Windows is well supported, you will end up using Windows all the time. Three, on the rare occasion you do boot to Ubuntu, as soon as something doesn't work easily and you get frustrated, you'll just reboot into Windows.
The only way to really use any *nix distro is to commit to using it. Get the Windows re-install DVD (and the Lenovo CD) just in case you change your mind later, then wipe the hard drive.
Install some distro and go to town. You will have problems. You will scream in frustrated rages, and curse my name. But eventually you will find the distro that's right for you and your hardware, you'll get it tweaked just right, and when people ask if you use Windows or Mac, you'll just smirk and say, "No."
EDIT: Do you have 6 GB of RAM, or 16? With 16, you probably want an 18 GB swap.
OK OK IT Tech here Go here: http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=downloads download and burn this onto a cd. you can use xboot: https://sites.google.com/site/shamurxboot/ to create a bootable usb drive if you like. boot off this cd or usb by selecting it on the bios screen (usual hit F12 or similar) once booted you will see on the desktop an icon saying "disk health" double click it double click your drive open up the self tests tab and run a short test. if it fails your hard drive is buggered. replace it! --yoma
Your plan sounds good.
1 - Doubtful. You could lose all the data on your drive, but windows should install fine on a blank hard-drive.
2 - Yes, you should be able to restore the Linux backup. No guarantees it won't cause the same problem again. Rather than restoring a backup of the partition I'd recommend reinstalling Linux, and then bringing over your home folder / whatever else you backed up.
3 - A live CD for most Linux distros will do, as should (I think) booting off the Windows install cd. If you need a suggestion for this I'd go for Parted-Magic
4 - Sorry, not so much. Getting Windows to live peacefully with Linux is certainly possible, but not easy.
Good luck sir.
Boot from a LiveCD such as Parted Magic
Make a partition image (see: partimage) of the "/" and the Windows partition on the external drive
Delete the SWAP primary partition
Shrink the NTFS primary partition
Resize/move the extended partition
Create logical /home partition inside the extended partition
Create EXT4 filesystem in /home partition (include the option "-L HomePart" for mkfs.ext4)
Create logical SWAP partition inside the extended partition
Mount the /home partition and the "/" partition
Move everything in the /home directory structure to the /home partition
Edit /etc/fstab to mount the /home partition to the /home directory (if you included the "-L" option with mkfs.ext4, you can identify the partition in /etc/fstab as "LABEL=HomePart")
Oh, and I think that will all work. But I'm just some doofus on the internet, after all.
EDIT:
Try booting into a thumb drive linux diagnostic/utility distro like parted magic and see if the problem persists. The fact that your GPU is also running so hot at idle makes me think you may be infected with bitcoin mining malware, although I don't know if it's possible for those to hide cpu/gpu usage.
Burn yourself a Parted Magic LiveCD. Boot with that and use Gparted to manipulate the partitions. (Gparted is a GUI partitioning tool.)
But you'll need to figure out what's what with GRUB first.
When the drive is connected, is it seen in the bios, is it seen in Windows under disk management?
If it's seen in disk management try Recuva. http://www.piriform.com/recuva
If it's not seen inside Windows, try TestDisk within Parted Magic. http://partedmagic.com
[](/solution)Parted magic is an excellent tool, and can me run from either a USB thumb-drive or a CD.
If you'd like to use it with a USB Thumb-Drive, I recommend this tool. You can actually download Parted Magic directly from this application to be put on the thumb-drive, if I remember correctly.
Simply reboot into the thumb-drive with Parted Magic installed, and it should be pretty self explanatory from that point.
I have had something similar happen to me, I had to use Parted Magic to re partition the drive. If you are unfamiliar with Parted Magic its a ISO that you can download, burn to a CD and then run as a LIVE CD. It can be a useful tool to have.
Question - Do you have anything stored on D:\ at all?
If not (even if you do, you could backup the stuff), you should be able to delete that partition with GParted, and then extend your C:\ partition to fill that empty space. This will only work if your C:\ partition is first on the disk, not second (which is how it probably is, I have no idea how it would be any other way). Of course you want to backup everything before attempting this since you never know what might happen. You will want to be careful to not move your C:\ partition at all, as this may cause Windows to fail to boot.
Download and burn a copy of Parted Magic: http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=downloads
It includes GParted among other tools, and runs from a CD.
If something goes terribly wrong and you need to reinstall Windows 7: You should be able to use a Windows 7 Retail DVD, so as long as it is the same edition as what you had installed. So, if you have 7 Home Premium 64-Bit, you need a 7 Home Premium 64-Bit DVD. On the bottom of your laptop, or possibly under the battery inside of the battery compartment, is a Windows 7 license sticker with the edition type and an OEM product key. This is the key you enter when prompted by the installer.
I've successfully used a retail 7 DVD along with the OEM key on Toshiba laptops, it just requires activation over phone once Windows is installed. Someone else might be able to help you more here if an issue like this arises.
You can download and use pmagic to try and get the data from the drive. You can burn the ISO and boot from the Cd to use it. You might even be able to repair the drive within pmagic. depending on the issue.
Also depending on how much data she needs retrieved you can use EaseUs Data Recovery they have a free version that allows you to pull a gig of data for free.
Oh you can also try Recuva from Piriform. Its a free software and has no limits to how much data you can use. I haven't used it yet but they make CCleaner and Defraggler which are both solid programs.
Edited to add Recuva
You should always have a PartedMagic LiveCD/USB hanging around... Here's why. (among many other reasons)
I dont know if they updated it to work with Vista/7, but I've used it numerous times on XP machines for clients.
i use parted magic (http://partedmagic.com/doku.php) twenty times a day at the tech shop that I work for. It is the fastest, most reliable (read: most compatible) live distro I've ever used. you can test the hard drive using gsmartcontrol application on the desktop to test the SMART status of your drive. ESSENTIAL. also, the particular packages it comes with are compiled with every possible option... for example, the version of ntfsprogs it uses (used to work with windows filesystems) has some pretty obscure options that aren't in the ubuntu/fedora packages.
I use Gsmartcontrol for linux: http://gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.net/home/
It is also included in PartedMagic, which is a linux distro with a variety of diagnostic and partitioning tools: http://partedmagic.com/
Downloads of PartedMagic cost $9, but all software included is free and open sourced so you are free to distribute as you wish!
Since diskmgr.msc sais "not initiated" and you get that error trying to create a volume I think there is something wrong with the drive. As I said you could boot into a linux distro such as knoppix, PartedMagic <3 or the UltimateBootCD and further analyse it there, but if you have never done so, send the drive back as a warranty case. They are supposed to be pre formatted anyway, so something went wrong either way. The only thing I'd consider worth the effort beforehand is checking it in a different system.
Going very basic here, but can you hear it spin up and down when your system boots or you try to access it?
Is that sort of thing all you use those systems for? I might try firing up PartedMagic and see how well it does. Since it's an admin-utility distro and not a desktop distro, its developer can focus more on things like hardware support. I've had pretty good luck with it working right out-of-the-box with most anything.
Ok well first thing...
if you think its a power issue try using a semi high quality or high quality power bar. Also maybe its a faulty wire just a little to the left or right and it powers down.When the pc does boot up did you check your temperatures???if everything is normal lets go next step
Now if you have a bit of pc exp "Buy" partition magic 2013 make a bootable usb and you can check the hard drive integrity at your dads house it takes long but ive repaired a many a drives using this tool.If no go with the main stuff format drive reinstall windows..i doubt your having electrical issues if no other things would bug out at your house lights would flicker and stuff like that i think mainly you might have a corrupted HD or a heat issue
link for parted magic http://partedmagic.com/downloads/ If you have nothing vs pirates you know where to go
There is a secure erase option in Parted Magic.
http://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/
I use that first for mechanical drives but it is unavailable for the specific drive then Parted Magic has DBAN also.
Boot PartedMagic from a USB flash drive. It loads to RAM, so you can then remove the flash drive and do whatever.
Any number of distros can do this, but PartedMagic is nice because it's not a LiveUSB intended to facilitate install. It's a maintenance and repair distro, so it sacrifices eye-candy and video players in favor of excellent out-of-the-box suport for hardware, file systems, storage abstraction, etcetcetc.
It's not free. The price has bumped to a whopping $9. A better value you will not find, IMO. Caveat emptor.
Parted Magic is a linux distro you could use. There is an outdated free version on cnet and other sites, but for only $5 you get the most up to date version. Once it's booted navigate to your username in the file explorer. Then it should be under something like microsoft outlook -> filename.pst and filename.ost. One of those files is the archived inbox and the other is what's currently in your email client.
All right, sorry to come back to you so late. I tried what you told me without much success, so I just went ahead and re-did my whole Windows 7 install. Bought Parted Magic to safely wipe my SSD (I've got a few copies left, let me know if you want one, it came in real handy)
In any case, everything seems to be working fine right now. I am in the process of reinstalling all the drivers and nothing so far has brought up the lag once again. Thanks a bunch!
Sounds like your C:\ partition has gone bad. I'd try booting from partedmagic off a USB and checking whether you can see any of the files and run a health check. If you can't see any of the files, your RAID array has probably failed.
Which RAID version did you use?
Due to wear leveling, the only way to properly erase an SDD is with the ATA Secure Erase command.
A tool to do this from within Windows with can be found here. You'll want to use the "enhanced" option if it's available for your drive.
If this SSD is the one you're booted off, you'll need to do it some other way, like using a linux liveCD/liveUSB (I personally like Knoppix) and issuing the command via hdparm. Instructions for doing this can be found here.
>I don't understand the nature of your question...
I had never before heard of a linux install affecting the ability of Windows 7™ to properly hibernate. Thanks for the link to examples because, to be honest, I thought maybe you were just a wee bit mad.
Anyway, the problem would seem to have nothing to do with CAElinux but rather with the configuration of GRUB. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a good reference for how to fix it; the link you already have is probably as good as any.
Some sort of BIOS-mediated dual-boot may be possible, but is completely dependent on your hardware. The only way to know for sure is through trying to do it.
But I would think repairing GRUB would be easier (and faster) than restoring Windows and then sorting out a BIOS-mediated dual-boot arrangement. To repair GRUB you might-could use Ultimate Boot CD, or spend the $5 for the current version of Parted Magic (well worth the money, IMO). Though, in the end all you really need is a bootable CD/DVD or USB drive with most any Linux distribution on it.
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/
Just install the iso's in the order you want them to show up in the list using that.
and this is the partmagic I use http://partedmagic.com/
The BIOS may not be listing the SSD as a boot option because of how it's formatted. Boot to PartedMagic or some LiveCD distro and fire up gparted
. I'm guessing it will see both drives.
All while my PC was "out of order", lol
The recovery software is a Linux LiveCD called Parted Magic
I personally like ghost the best. Many times I'll just plug both HDDs into a spare computer I have lying around and run it from within windows.
Achronis is much more pretty but I'm probably just old school and like the same interface from the late 90s.
Otherwise if you want free go with http://partedmagic.com make a live CD boot to it and get the image cloned and resized. Or use the advanced flags in clonezilla to have it do the work for you. http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone/advanced/05-advanced-param.php
Tails is likely ill-suited for this task: it's a security distro. I'd recommend Parted Magic here instead. It has tools that are much better suited to what you're trying to do.
Thanks! Sadly, my OS drive is a Corsair one and the Samsung SSD is for games. Could you link me anything about this topic? I have no idea, how I would go about secure erasing an SSD.
// Edit: something like this? http://partedmagic.com/
ran Hiren, currently in a linux distro called Parted Magic. It seems to have the tools relevant to what i need done. Which of those listed on the site should i use first to fix my hard drive?
I use PartedMagic to diagnose hard drives. I typically run the internal secure erase command.
Here's some info on the secure erase command.
I use Linux boot CDs all the time for drive imaging, partition re-sizing, and hardware troubleshooting in my windows environment. I also like to use the liveCD environment to check out any suspicious files I may encounter, like verifying the contents of a zip file that a user isn't sure is legit or not.
I like the partedMagic boot cd, it's a well maintained boot cd that has a ton of utilities. The maintainer charges like $5 for a download, but it's well maintained and worth the money IMO.
I've had drive recognition problems after interrupting a Windows 7 install on my laptop.
The problem can be resolved by attaching the HDD to another computer and doing a quick format to the NFTS file type. If the drive doesn't show up, it will show up in the "Create and Format Disk Partitions" tool.
If you don't have access to another computer, but have a CD/DVD drive, you can create and use a bootable disk with PartedMagic to format the drive.
you could try http://partedmagic.com/ which might work better though it said it might be harder since windows will try to mount the file system. you could also spin up a live CD and test it with linux tools.
EDIT: even better try http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki smartmontools is what i would use in linux and it says it also runs on windows
BSOD'd in safe mode, huh? Is there anything you can to do that will consistently cause this? Do you only see it happening after some time has past?
If this is hardware related, and it really sounds like it, your lock ups should occur outside of Windows. Try to get a lock up while booted to a live cd. Preferable one that has an app to take a look at your SMART tables while you're in there. I linked to knoppix earlier and parted magic is another good ISO to have.
Edit: Have you taken a look at your hardware? Any chance you have significant dust buildup? Bubbling caps?
Hells bells, why the FUCK would an OEM put four partitions on the HDD? I hate when they do that shit. One of the many reasons I don't recommend dual-booting. But I digress.
If you can blow away the HP Tools partition, you can create an extended partition, and then make a logical partition inside that for Fedora.
If you need the HP thingy, you might could copy it using partimage, then blow it away and create an extended partition. Then make a logical partition for the HP thing, and one for Fedora.
Get a copy of PartedMagic and boot that. It's got all the tools you need to prep the HDD.
Use Parted Magic and follow this guide. After that, reinstall Windows.
>Fedora LiveCD won't boot.
That's odd. It should boot irrespective of what's on the hard drive. It just won't necessarily be able to mount the disks. Or so it seems to me.
Is this Fedora 16 or the new Fedora 17? Though even with Beefy:
> 2.4.3. btrfs
>btrfs is not available as a target file system during installation. This is a temporary situation and will be resolved in Fedora 18. btrfs is still available after installation.
Though, why are you using btrfs? As far as I know, it still will periodically scramble itself, and you can't repair it in place. Unlike, well, lots of other things.
But that's a distraction. Any LiveCD should boot. Maybe try Parted Magic. The advantage of that being that there's directions for adding software packages to the bootable image. See: Adding Programs. And it already supports RAID and btrfs. You'd just have to add LVM. (Though, it has "device-mapper" out of the box, so it may be able to mount logical volume already, just not modify them.)
The best thing is to just blow away everything and do a new installation. Because that will clean up the GRUB2 installation while you're at it.
Next best: remove the NTFS partition and replace it with a new partition formatted as ext4. Create a directory /BFD in your home directory, then add a line to /etc/fstab similar to this:
/dev/sda1 /home/[username]/BFD ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
That will mount the new partition to the /BFD directory, and you can just stick all your files in there. You can use logical links to redirect other folders there, too.
You can try removing the NTFS partition and resizing the Ubuntu partition, but that might make GRUB2 unhappy. Not to mention scramble all your files. If you want to go there, boot from a CD or USB of Parted Magic and use Gparted.
Easiest and quickest to implement is parted magic. http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=start
To save image: 1. Create a image and run sysprep 2. boot client using parted magic media 3. use clonezilla and samba to save the disk to a file server somewhere (I use a standard share on a windows server).
To restore image: 1. Boot client using parted magic media 2. use clonezilla to clone your image onto the PC
To be honest one downside is that windows 7 deploy's better using WDS. I have to install the video card drivers on new clients every time. Not a big deal really though, it only takes a few minutes and in most cases I just use windows updates to get the drivers.
If your drive is phisically failing, every time you use it you are making things worse. Download and boot Parted Magic.
Use ddrescue (actually gddrescue in Parted Magic) by following some instructions to clone the drive to another drive internal or external, and then resize and re-write the MBR ( if needed), and set as boot.
Well that sucks, but at least you have something more to go on now.
parted magic includes linux SMART tools, as well as performance test software. It's a live CD/USB so its easy to work with. This is where i'd warn you to be careful with your data, but at this point i imagine you've got multiple backups, and your drive is full of corruption anyway.
Let me guess, your drive is a seagate? Get a warrenty replacement, sell it without opening it (prices are increasing from the thai floods still) and buy a western digital HDD, or an SSD.
Keep in mind that you havent proven the drive to be at fault yet, so dont get tunnelvision on the issue.
First, you should look at diagnostic Linux LiveCDs like PartedMagic, which come with HDD diagnostic tools, CloneZilla (for disk imaging - you can even add images to your liveCD), a functional GUI with browser, etc.
Bart's boot disk is another place you should do some reading if you want to build a bootable Windows-based diagnostic media.
Rather than putting things on a CD, use a USB stick, since you can put multiple writable filesystems on it.
Also, if you really want a project, check out Debian Live Build, which is a script that lets you build your own personalized, portable Linux install.
You could download ubuntu or pmagic burn the ISOto a CD and boot from the CD. Ubuntu you can run as a live cd, and pmagic is a live cd as well from within ubuntu or pmagic you should be able to delete the.
You might also want to run a check disk on that external drive as there could be some bad sectors that might not be letting you delete that file.
You can just use a Linux LiveCD to delete the partition you don't want and resize the other partition to fill the space. I'd recommend Parted Magic for quick partitioning operations.
I am kinda in the same boat as you, and I just split my HDD in half. I was told later I could resize the partitions with either http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=start or http://sysresccd.org/Main_Page with minimal effort. Take a look at em. I think both can even be booted from a flash drive if you use the right program. Or if you have a spare RW CD lying around keep em handy.