Installer wiped my hard drive

[scifidude79]

I'm an experienced Linux user, but I decided to try BSD with Ghost BSD 10.1 Mate (the one that was just released.) During installation, I selected "Manual Partitioning" and I created a new partition for Ghost BSD. I didn't touch my Linux or my Data partition, nor did I tell the installer to use the entire disk. I selected to not install Grub, as your Wiki says to do, because I wanted to use Grub from my Linux installation. After installation of Ghost BSD, I got the "Grub Rescue" message. I tried some commands to get Grub to work, but nothing worked. After booting to a Linux Live disc and a GParted disc, I found out both my Linux and Data partitions were gone. All GParted said was that I had an "unknown" filesystem. After booting into Ghost BSD Live, the partition manager showed only the Ghost BSD partition and the rest of the disk as "unused."

So, thanks a lot. Your installer wiped my HD, including partitions it wasn't supposed to touch. So, I now have to try and recover all of my data.

[ASX]

I have installed several dual boot systems (Linux/GhostBSD) using a procedure similar to what you described, manual partitioning, no bootloader ... and even Win/GhostBSD + Grub bootloader, and worked for me.

Of course, clearly something went wrong in your case, and personally I'm very afraid of that.

That said, if possible, I would like to get some data: do you used a GPT or MBR based setup ?
Can you run a Live GhostBSD and post here the output of

Code: Select all

gpart show -p

also, if possible at all, there should be a log in GhostBSD partition:

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/tmp/.pc-sysinstall/pc-sysinstall.log

if you could post its content here (or on pastebin.com) it would be useful to understand what went wrong.

All I can add is: if the newly created partition didn't overlapped your data partition, you should be able to restore your Linux data partition, using photorec or similar tools .

[scifidude79]

I no longer have a Live GhostBSD because that .iso was on the disk that got wiped and I had to overwrite the USB drive with my Linux distro to put it back on the computer so that I'd have an operating system that I could boot into, since even GhostBSD wouldn't boot.

I'm trying to recover my data using testdisk/photorec right now.

I've dual (or more) booted Linux and Linux using this method many times and never had this happen. I read the information on the GhostBSD Wiki before trying this, so I wasn't anticipating any issues, which is why I decided to go ahead with the install. I'm assuming it's possible, but I have no intention of trying this again because it already wiped my disk once.

[ASX]

I can understand your point, and I will not insist on that argument.

Still, it would be useful to me, to try to replicate your issue, to know about your tentative installation, mainly:

MBR or GPT based setup ?

From memory can you recall what was your disk layout before installing GhostBSD ?
primary partitions ? primary + extended ? separate /boot ?

Thanks for reporting your issue, and best of luck for recovering your data.

[scifidude79]

It's an MBR system. The layout prior to installation of Ghost BSD was as so:

sda2: Extended partition containing:
sda5: Linux swap
sda6: Peppermint OS
sda7: nothing (this is where I put Ghost BSD)
sda1: Primary NTFS data partition (holdover from when I used Windows, I hadn't switched to another file system)

Even though all I did was use sda7 to install Ghost BSD and that's all it should have done, everything else was deleted. It's very weird.

I'm using photorec in Peppermint right now to get what I can back from my data partition.

[spectre]

Is it not still the case that FreeBSD-based systems have to be installed to a primary partition if using the MBR partitioning scheme?

The FreeBSD boot loader requires either a primary or GPT partition. If all of the primary or GPT partitions are already in use, one must be freed for FreeBSD. To create a partition without deleting existing data, use a partition resizing tool to shrink an existing partition and create a new partition using the freed space.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO885 ... l-pre.html

[scifidude79]

I thought about that after the fact. However, it still shouldn't have wiped out all of my partitions, including another primary partition. If it had wiped out only sda2, I'd have gotten over it. However, there was still no good reason for it to wipe the entire disk.

[ASX]

Yes, GhostBSD require a primary partition for MBR based layout, but GhostBSD installer should have prevented the installation on an extended partition. ... something didn't worked as intended.

[scifidude79]

but GhostBSD installer should have prevented the installation on an extended partition. ... something didn't worked as intended.

I was wondering if that was true. Yeah, something got messed up. Oh well, it's water under the bridge now. I can either cry about it or move on (I choose the latter.)

However, despite what I said earlier in the thread, I'm going to try again. However, I'm also not stupid enough to try again on my main desktop. (besides, I'm busy re-downloading my Steam games on there) I have another desktop that I don't use for much, so I'm going to use it as a test system. I'm going to try the same setup I had before, with Peppermint OS 6 64-bit on there and try adding Ghost BSD Mate 10.1 64-bit. I thought of trying the XFCE edition, but I tried Mate before, so I need to try the same version for it to be a proper test. Though, of course, this time I'll put Ghost on a Primary partition. Anywho, I'm downloading the .iso via BitTorrent right now.