drive losing partion, older windows partition appearing

Loffler

10/7/22, 11:18 PM

Had this happen a couple times now. Working with Windows 10 and Ubuntu and occasional re-use disk from one machine to the other. Had a working boot disk that suddenly stopped after a couple weeks and when I looked at it in Disks, it showed twice the size and had Windows and Linux partitions neither of which were accessible. The screen shot attached shows the same problem on a different disk. The partition 1 contains a couple thousand files I'd like to have back. I was able to recover some, but they are incomplete and the recover process did not recover the file names. Less important than recovering the data is figuring out why formatting the disc is not removing the old partitions. Working with Ubuntu 20. I am pretty sure I formatted the disk and then created an ext4 partition, but it is showing here as a windows format. Thanks

0 + 6

partitioning

data-recovery

ChanganAuto

10/7/22, 11:27 PM

Partition 1 is an extended partition. It contains nothing but logical partitions inside. There's no "Windows partition" shown in the screenshot. So this question apparently stems from misunderstanding what an extended partition is.

Loffler

10/8/22, 12:45 AM

While that is interesting, it does nothing to answer my question. Let me restate. I do not know why this happened. Clearly that is not a normal representation of partitions on a disc. Do you know what would have caused it?

user535733

10/8/22, 1:05 AM

Clearly that IS a completely normal-looking representation of an old disk with one primary partition and [one extended partition](https://askubuntu.com/questions/151968/what-does-the-term-extended-partition-mean-is-it-safe-to-use-this-type-of-par). There is no useful data in your screenshot suggesting why your ext4 partition does not exist here. Maybe you erroneously partitioned a different disk. Maybe you did not commit the partition change. Lots of possible maybes. Try re-partitioning again. If the disk refuses to re-partition, or is otherwise unreliable, then replace it.

heynnema

10/8/22, 2:03 AM

The problem is that you have a **MBR partition table** on a **6TB** disk. It should be GPT/GUID.

Loffler

10/8/22, 2:08 AM

It was a data disk on a stable system. No disk changes were being made. Certainly did not create 4tb of partitions on a 3tb disk. This has happened twice so I was hoping there was a known cause. Maybe it is just a disc failure.

ChanganAuto

10/8/22, 2:42 AM

Not 3TB, it clearly shows 6TB, something I missed while chasing the red herrings in your question. Fortunately @heynnema noticed. Indeed, weird thing will keep happening if you insist in using MBR for any drive bigger than 2TB, that exactly where your "problems" start. Please take a moment to reserch a bit about what has been said so far. There's nothing indicating disk failure. This is user failure. You need to (1) understand *why* the 40+ years old MBR shouldn't be used in big drives due to its limitations and (2) the difference between *primary* and *extended* and (3) *why* you need GPT.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: drive losing partion, older windows partition appearing

TH: ไดรฟ์สูญเสียพาร์ติชัน พาร์ติชัน windows เก่าปรากฏขึ้น

RO: unitatea pierde partiția, apare o partiție mai veche de Windows

RU: диск теряет раздел, появляется старый раздел Windows

VI: Ổ đĩa bị mất phân vùng, phân vùng windows cũ hơn xuất hiện

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