Solved Won't Boot When Particular Second Hard Drive Added

[anotherusername]

SOLUTION:

The solution was provided by Pauly:

...if you installed full UEFI making your boot disk GPT then adding an MBR disk can cause a fail to boot situation
You always have the option of putting the drive into an enclosure and connecting via USB

ORIGINAL QUESTION:

My HP Box won't boot when a particular second hard drive is added. That second hard drive has been partitioned for linux.

I get this error:

GPT-Formatted Disk
Legacy boot not supported

Normally my machine boots fine off the primary drive when I have a second drive installed (as long as that second drive is formatted as ntfs, I guess).

But once I put this drive in, I get the error.

BTW: The reason I am putting this second drive in is because it used to have Windows on it and I just formatted it to run Linux mint. Unfortunately, I didn't get all the data off of it before I formatted. The partitions are gone, but much of the data is still on the drive (as far as I can tell using testdisk). so I am trying to boot with my primary drive (as usual) with the second drive installed so that I can try and recover some files off of the drive.

Thanks in advance.

HP Elite 8300
Win 7 Pro 64 bit
8 Gigs ram

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Have you tried using a linux live media to recover the data
Also removing the formatting using gparted ?

 

[anotherusername]

@ 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.

 

[anotherusername]

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

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
I'm not all that familiar with how the recovery stuff works,
You can ask on the tutorial of the version you booting with possibly someone there can help,

With all Linux stuff you might also look into this site I've had luck there before
Linux Mint Forums ? View forum - Newbie Questions

 

[whs]

What is the boot sequence in the BIOS

 

[RolandJS]

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

 

[anotherusername]

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.

 

[anotherusername]

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.)

 

[whs]

If there is an active partition on the drive in question, deactivate that.

https://social.technet.microsoft.co...ate-an-active-partition?forum=itprovistasetup

 

[Pauly]

What format is your current main boot drive, if you installed full UEFI making your boot disk GPT then adding an MBR disk can cause a fail to boot situation
You always have the option of putting the drive into an enclosure and connecting via USB

 

[anotherusername]

If there is an active partition on the drive in question, deactivate that.

https://social.technet.microsoft.co...ate-an-active-partition?forum=itprovistasetup

Thanks for the note.

I would try that solution, but as mentioned above, I can't even boot into windows once that second drive is installed. and the solution you linked to requires booting into windows.

Thanks.

 

[whs]

Can't you attach it once the OS is booted. Else you will have to do it with Gparted from a live Linux system.

 

[anotherusername]

What format is your current main boot drive, if you installed full UEFI making your boot disk GPT then adding an MBR disk can cause a fail to boot situation
You always have the option of putting the drive into an enclosure and connecting via USB

Thank you for the reply:

What format is your current main boot drive,

Not 100% sure this is what you want to know, but this is what I could find:

Two volumes:

Disk 0
Basic
Online
100MB Healthy (EFI System Partition)

Me (C: )
465.54GB NTFS
Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition).

Since I don't think I have a USB case that will take a SATA drive (my USB case is old and I think it is an IDE drive in there currently, do you think I could just delete the MBR from the second drive???

Plan B: I know that I could delete the partitions of the second drive when I boot up using a linux CD. Just is that going to erase all the DATA as well?

Thanks in advance!

 

[anotherusername]

Can't you attach it once the OS is booted. Else you will have to do it with Gparted from a live Linux system.

I have tried to hot plug in the sata cable, and that did not seem to work.

So I started with the second drive in the bay with the power cable plugged in but the sata cable unplugged, then after it booted up, hot plugged the sata cable, but it was not recognized. I went to device manager and refreshed, and it didn't see the drive. I went to the utility for format drive just to see if it was visible, and it wasn't visible there, either.

Else you will have to do it with Gparted from a live Linux system.

I have that drive in a separate box right now and I am booted up with a live Linux disk and I have gparted open.

could you please kindly tell me WHAT I should do though?

would simply changing the flag (the main ext4 partition has a boot flag) solve the problem?

Or would I need to actually delete the partitions?

And would I need to create an NTFS partition afterwards?

And would this delete the files that were on the drive?

Thanks in advance.

 

[anotherusername]

Well... I got it to boot up...

I used a live Linux disk to delete the MBR and the partitions, using this command:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1

Note that this deletes BOTH the MBR AND the partition table.

I got it from here:

Linux Delete / Remove MBR

I then booted up the computer with this disk in the slave drive and windows booted up fine off the primary drive.

I tried to run recuva to get the files, but it said that it couldn't read the drive because it didn't know the file format.

So, I went to the Disk Management utility and initialized the disk.

A simple inialization didn't fix it, so I created a simple volume on the disk, making sure that quick format was checked.

Then I restarted recuva...

When I did a simple scan, it said there were no files

But it gave me the option to do a deep scan, which I elected to do.

The deep scan is estimated to take about 50 minutes. It is showing SOME promise: it is 70% done and it says that it has found nearly 600,000 files!!!

I have to wait another 20 minutes or so, then I hopefully will know whether those files can actually be recovered or not.

I hope this helps anyone else in my predicament.

 

[whs]

I think you are only going to get junk. Those 600.000 files are nothing you can use.

 

[anotherusername]

I think you are only going to get junk. Those 600.000 files are nothing you can use.

Well, not entirely...

I am using recuva, and it found a ridiculous number of image files (that is what I am concentrating on right now).

Recuva was able to "partially recover" 275,000 jpg, gif, png files.

A good number of them ARE junk. They tend to have file names like:

$I0AR6UX_3.JPG

But taking a look through, it does seem like there will be a lot of fully recovered image files.

the problem I see is going to be sorting through all of them.

Is there a utility that I could use to quickly find all the corrupt jpg files in a folder?

 

[anotherusername]

Just to update:

I had previously used photorec (part of testdisk utility) and it recovered about 26,000 photo files.

The files names were not recovered, so the majority of files have names like:

f01345789.jpg
[31567829.gif
t99532814.jpg

Recuva, on the other hand, found ten-times as many photo files, but the majority of them are corrupted.

So photorec seemed to recover only those files that weren't corrupted, while recuva recovered tons of files that are corrupted beyond repair.

this seems to be the case for various pdf and different doc files as well.

Now I am trying purinan file recovery and will see what it can do.

 

[anotherusername]

Well, I got a lot of junk, and a lot of good files, too.

Sorting through it all is going to be a nightmare.

I found that disk drill is quite user friendly, especially when compared to recuva.

With disk drill, you can "lock" the disk you are working on, and save your project for later. So if you are interrupted after doing a scan but before recovering all the files, you can resume where you left off later.

It seemed like for recuva, you had to do the whole scan over again.

Recuva found the MOST files, but overwhelmingly they were junk or files that were on repair.

So if this were to happen again, I think I would use photorec first to recover pretty much everything, and then use disk drill, which might not recover as much as photorec, but does tend to organize things better.

Hope this helps.