Won't Boot When Particular Second Hard Drive Added

@ Thrash Media:

Thanks for your response.

"Have you tried using a linux live media to recover the data"

Yes, i have used a live linux USB to boot and run photorec to retrieve the files, so I know the individual files are all there.

the problem with that is photorec recovers ALL the files and renames them (and there is no folder structure retained), so all the files just come kind of clumped together with dames like

f03678124.jpg
f39125672.pdf
t85857231.doc
f45903171.txt

I'd pretty much have to go through THOUSANDS of files and first determine whether it is a data file I need to keep, or whether it is an old windows system file (that I can throw away) or a new Linux system file (that I can throw away) or what it is.

And then the ones I need to keep, I would have to rename and put it in a new folder structure.

As for the other question:

"Also removing the formatting using gparted ?"

I haven't tried that yet because I wasn't sure EXACTLY how to do that.

Do I just need to delete the Linux partitions on the drive? (There's an ext4 boot partition, an extended partition, and a linux-swap partition on there now).

No ntfs partition is found.

However, when I use the data rescue function of gparted under the device menu, it says:

Data Found: File systems

#1: ntfs (152531 MiB)

It's a 160gb hard drive. Does the above 152531 MiB size sound right?

However, when I clicked on the View button in the rescue data window, I get this note:

Failed creating read-only view
An error occurred while creating the read-only view.

So if someone could clarify how best to remove the partitions (or what I should do next,) it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
Either the file system can not be mounted (like swap), or there are inconsistencies or errors in the file system.

One other thing:

I ran testdisk on it, and I BELIEVE (correct me if I am wrong) that testdisk did find somethin, though not sure what:


Disk /dev/sda - 160 GB / 149 GiB - CHS 19452 255 63

The harddisk (160 GB / 149 GiB) seems too small! (< 14059260 TB / 12786823 TiB)
Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings, BIOS detection...

The following partitions can't be recovered:
Partition Start End Size in sectors

MS Data 151259152 455704591 304445440
MS Data 151261616 455707055 304445440
MS Data 151263136 455708575 304445440
MS Data 151267864 455713303 304445440
MS Data 151269048 455714487 304445440
MS Data 151269336 455714775 304445440
MS Data 151269480 455714919 304445440
MS Data 151270760 455716199 304445440

[ Continue ]
XFS 6.2+ - bitmap version blocksize=1952670573, 14059260 TB / 12786823 TiB

whs said:

What is the boot sequence in the BIOS

Well, I have tried EVERY possible boot sequence I could come up with.

I have moved my primary drive up in the boot sequence and the second drive down as far as possible.

I have tied with legacy boot enabled. I have tried with it disabled. I have tried with boot security enabled. i have tried with it disabled.

Just to cover ALL bases, I even tried selecting the second drive (the one partitioned for Linux) as the first boot drive, just thinking that possibly a bit of reverse psychology would work.

It didn't.

I have tried hitting the f9 button (this brings up a special "real-time" boot menu in hp boxes) and made sure that the primary drive was selected. Again, same problem. won't boot.

It's weird, because once I take that second drive out and either boot up with JUST the one primary drive, or boot up with a DIFFERENT secondary drive, then the box boots up fine.

RolandJS said:

Data recovery this late in the game is going to be dicey; have you tried to open any recovered files yet?

Yes, I have:

The majority of them seem to open up fine, as far as I can tell, but there are a few pdf or .doc files that seem to be corrupted.

There are THOUSANDS of files though, and none of them have descriptive names. That's my MAIN problem (at least, I HOPE that is the main problem.)