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My first nvme disk allows dual booting of Ubuntu 20.04 and Windows 10 and that is functioning fine. My second disk is a 1TB SSD drive and is normally a single 1TB partition (I am pretty sure it was ext4) and it is about 66% full of data and has no need for booting. Ubuntu now reports the second disk as having just one 16MB partition with the remainder of the disk being free space. The 16MB partition is now of Type “Microsoft Reserved” and it spans from sector 34 to sector 32734.

It seems that when I booted into Windows 10 yesterday and ran Window’s Disk Manager that I have inadvertently clobbered the linux partition table even though I was cautious of not writing to disk.

Is there any hope of recovering the ext4 partition now that I appear to have overwritten sectors 34 to 32734?

Timbergetter
  • 91

1 Answers1

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I managed to recover all my data after applying e2fsck and referencing the fourth superblock. This created a device dev/sda which I was able to mount directly and lift all the data off the disk. There was no reference to dev/sda1 partition in this instance. Rebooting the computer causes the disk to revert back to the 16MB windows reserved partition and empty space. I’ll be zeroing out the front end of this disk before re-instituting my ext4 partition and keeping well clear of Windows Disk Manager from here on. It seems to be a very arrogant and draconian practice that Microsoft has adopted where it attempts to destroy something that it does not recognize.

Timbergetter
  • 91