i woke up and well started off with a little bit of cloth simulation and well I had to go the university. I decide to take a trip to uni and hibernate my linux and go and come back i get a frozen screen.
I restart the system and boom Linux is gone.. down ... dead...
It gave me this
GRUB4DOS 0.4.4 2008-10-27, MEMORY: 639K / 478M, CodeEnd: 0x42910
[Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB
lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
completions of a device/filename. ESC at any time exits.]
grub>
It allows only very little access to the whole of linux and absolutely no access to the filesystem what so ever . So the whole day was spent in solving this.
What had happened:
Linux can be installed in different ways. One of the type of linux is called the WUBI linux which is nothing but installing linux inside of windows vista instead of partioning a space for linux on its own .My system apparantly ran a wubi mode of linux. So for some reason during the hibernation process the NTFS file system which is the file system governing the Windows partitioning of the system got corrupted and I never managed to figure it out. Online research stated that it might be due to different reasons even power failures. But any ways the NTFS file system on partition sda2 of my system got corrupted and which basically means linux was gone .. poooof....
So what then:
I came back and well i got the grub prompt and started off with my research into the topic. So apparantly wubi version of linux is highly unstable and as someone quoted "it is like building a house on shifting sands" . Wubi version of linux is like a software installed inside vista but the only difference being it is not a software but a whole operating system inside of vista and well i personally dont have toog good opinion on vista.
So first off i found that i need a liveCD version of linux. LiveCD is the type of linux which is downloaded as a iso file and extracted and writtern on a disk.
So what is a iso file::
ISO files are special formats which are used to write contents onto a disk . but unlike normal files iso files cannot be dragged dropped into the cd. Rather it needs to be extracted and writtern on disk. To do this what we need some softwares to extract the iso images to the proper files...
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto gives u a bit of introduction to iso images
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download gives you the iso file of linux
What you do is download the iso file and then use the softwares like iso burner to burn it to a disk or dvd. Problem wouldnt burn or me because the disk were used also only one softwares allowed burning dvd.
But i managed it..
so i put my livecd disk on my system and restart it and well choose the "run linux without changes to my computer" option .What it does is it lets you run linux from the cd without installation. But since it is run from another media it is mightily slow... and well anything you do is not saved and you cant install pluggins and software.. basically a highly restricted freedom.
If that doesn't change anything, how about downloading the Boot Info Script to your Ubuntu desktop from http://sourceforge.net/projects/bootinfoscript/ , open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and do:
sudo bash ~/Desktop/boot_info_script*.sh
This will create a file called sudo bash Results.txt which can probably help you with the problem. It did to me atleast..
In a wubi version of the linux "root.disk" is the file which is stored in the windows which contains the entire file system of linux. Approximately the size of the data you had stored ..
When i did a search for the file system i could nt locate the .disk file at all.. What had happened I have no clue but all i know is the file was missing .. In fact the entire folder was missing...
So when i tried to recover using the following steps:
sudo fdisk -l
sudo mkdir /win
sudo mount /dev/sdxy /win
sudo mkdir /vdisk
sudo mount -o loop /win/ubuntu/disks/root.disk /vdisk
it executed step 1 2 3 and 4 but the virtual disk couldnt execute the 5th line and mount the file system because the file didnt exist.
I also came to understand that if the file is lost the file system is lost as in any of the files in the old linux become un recoverable..Bugged I searched more .. What happened is windows occasionally moves the file for no reason .. lol.. and well it had been moved..
One of the suggestion i saw was that the anti virus software decided it is a bad file and quarentied it ... checking anti virus logs helps as well
sudo fsck /win/ubuntu/disks/root.disk
can be used to help sort out the errors interfering with the boot.. well didnt work for me either...
so ran the checkdisk on my windows .. well to do this you log into windows, open a terminal, navigate to the folder where linux is installed and in the folder run this chkdsk /r. Of course you need admin rights.
This will request a restart .. do it ... well it will check the whole file system and give a report.. well happened windows is supposed to move the disk file to a folder in c:/ called found.0000..
When i opened my c:/ and looked for found.0000 i couldnt find the folder and when i used ava find to check my disk for found.0000 i found it and when i openied it .. there it was... emptyness.. no .disk file.. no nothing.. my files were poof....
i went back online searched and found if the files were gone very well your filesystem is gone so forget linux.. convinced i need to do all my years work again i decided to reinstall linux..
but as luck would have it i decided to give it one last try and let my live cd load ...
mounted up my windows and opened my home folder from live cd.. navigated to the /win folder and looked for found.0000/.. apparantly linux folder showed found.0000.. what i found in additon was another folder called found.0001... feeling wierd i opened it and there it was my .disk file .. nice and safe hidden away ....
i grabbed it copied it to the disks folder in ubuntu ... you should have seen me hopping around when i found it
sudo fdisk -l
sudo mkdir /win
sudo mount /dev/sdxy /win
sudo mkdir /vdisk
sudo mount -o loop /win/ubuntu/disks/root.disk /vdisk
did that and well i managed to mount a virtual disk and access the contents of wubi.. yayyyyyyy
wrote this long ass article so that anyone who has the same problem as me need not sit and learn all about online computing for 24 hrs straight
MY ADVICe::
Dont use wubi linux when you can very well do a partioned linux.. makes life easier
Back up , copy ,store else where and do anything to hide and keep copies of what you do
If you have a doubt feel free to ask me .. i think i can find the answer with another few hrs research lol
