[Fornhamfred]

I have several distros installed on my machine and after re-installing one of them I have lost access to the Pclinux Gnome home partition.
Fstab did not point to the correct partition and I have edited it to the correct UUID. However it still reports no home partition. The partition which is listed as home has only 307mb of info ( not sure if this is relevant). I do have a remaster of the Pclinux install, can I just re-install it?

[ongoto]

You probably forgot to tell the installer to NOT format your /home partition. It got wiped. What you lost is your users' directories. You can create new users.

Can you still boot into your other installed systems (other than Gnome) without problems?

[melodie]

Hi,
If you don't reformat and or reinstall now, you might be able to get backwards, using testdisk. I have pointed to a howto for a newbie once, who had done about the same mistake and he succeeded in recovering his former partition scheme, and the data which were inside.

Here is a howto, and I wish you good luck.

[Fornhamfred]

Thanks for the info. Would it not be possible to copy the home partition from the live remaster disc?

[melodie]

Hi,
Let me put it this way : when you will have read the page with the testdisk howto, you will want to have it in front of you in another machine while trying to get back the lost partition. If you succeed in finding it, next step will bring you to erase what you just did last, and which caused the lost of the partition.

If you succeed and boot again to the former system, and regain therefore access to that /home partition, then you will be able to copy the datas, or the partition to another media.

You have to consider it as as last chance to recover lost data.

There is another possibility I have thought about : maybe your partition is still there and just covered by the new mount point. If this the case, you wouldn't need to use testdisk. To check if this is the case, this time you could visit the hard drive from within a live cd or live usb.

[ongoto]

... or you could just reinstall your remaster and save yourself a lot of time and grief.

[melodie]

... or you could just reinstall your remaster and save yourself a lot of time and grief.

Hi,
I might indeed have seen only the catastrophic side of the event...

I do have a remaster of the Pclinux install, can I just re-install it?

[Fornhamfred]

Thanks for your suggestions Melodie but as I have a recent remaster I would like to go that root.
I have just tried to install from the remaster but got stuck at the partition section. The system wants to mount root ( / ) on the partition of another distro on my small drive SDA and does not give the option to put it on my drive on which PCLinux (SDB8). It recognises that PClinux is installed on SDB8 and the home partition is SDB6 but in the list of mount points it does not list / and comes up with SDA5 /, SDB6 Home and without reselecting SDB8 /var.
Any help would be appreciated.

[ongoto]

Fornhamfred

I'm not sure whether you are doing a custom install or going with the existing partitions, but are you seeing a window similar to this?


You don't have to go with what is suggested. You can highlight (left click drag) and delete any entry in these input boxes. Then specify your own choices from the drop-down lists for each box.

In your case, since you have multiple drives, you would want to select SDA and clear all the entries. Then select SDB and set it up the way you want. Am I in the ball park here?

[Fornhamfred]

Thanks. No it did not look like your picture but I was able to remove the / on sda5 and then reassign it to my sdb8 partition. Everything is now working fine. Thanks for your help.