Problem mounting partition after Gparted

Question

I had 3 partitions on my hard drive and I tried to merge sda5 with sda6 but for some reason gparted crashed. Now when I try to mount sda5, all I find in it is lost+found. I’m running Lubuntu 14.04.

Answer 1

The crash during a partition merge likely damaged the file system. That's why you should create backups beforehand.

• The easiest “fix” is to re-format the partition, if you don't care about any data that may be recoverable.

• If you're lucky, you can salvage most of the data with fsck, but you should create a raw copy of /dev/sda5 and work on the image, in case fsck makes things worse.

  You can run fsck /path/to/image directly on the image file, but if you want to access the (hopefully) recovered files, you need to mount it with the loop option:

  sudo mount -r -o loop /path/to/image /path/to/mountpoint
  

  This mounts the image read-only, since you only want to look at and salvage its data and not modify it (accidentally).

• Lastly, if fsck doesn't help, you can try more low-level data recovery (assuming the partition contained an ext4 file system). You can use the (unaltered) disk image again, that you may have created earlier, in case you re-purposed the disk space for something else in the mean time.

In any case you should re-format the partition in the end. Don't keep using an obviously broken file system, even if you can fix it enough to salvage your data.