Damaged partition table in external USB drive

[Atechie]

I have a Linksys Network storage gadget that runs snapgear modifed Linux. It apparantly has a bug that it occasionally damages the partition table of the USB connected drive. I then have to delete the partition table by connecting the USB drive to a win2K box, connecting it back to the Linux box and reformatting the drive, losing all the data.

Is there any way to repair the partition table without losing all the data. I know can do it for a FAT filesystem but I am new to Linux.

[Icarus]

A bug that deletes data? That's not a bug, that's a major manufacturer defect! I'd ask for a refund on that

As for recovering the partition table, not very difficult. Read up on testdisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html) as that is designed to recover partitions.
And always do a lot of research before trying to recover data, if done incorrectly it will do more damage then good

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Originally posted by Icarus
A bug that deletes data? That's not a bug, that's a major manufacturer defect! I'd ask for a refund on that


The only thing on that, though, is they might come back and say, "WELL THATS BECAUSE UR RUNNING THE LUNIX, SIR" and try to pawn it off there. Can you confirm that this happens in Windows, or does it just happen when running Linux?

[Atechie]

The device that does that is the Linksys Network storage NSLU2. This has an Intel IXP4... processor with 32MB RAM running snapgear modified embedded Linux with Samba sever. It has an Ethernet port and 2 USB2.0 ports on which you can connect external drives. The "bug" that damages data has been widely discussed on yahoo group (nslu2-general). Complaints to Linksys have resulted in no understandable answer. They simply dont accept that there is a bug.