Hello, I apologize if this is in the wrong section. I'm having a problem with my hard drive. I was trying to install Linux Mint 11 on my laptop, however since I'm a complete noob at this I messed the partitions up. Every time I start my laptop it says "Partition Table Invalid", recovery mode does nothing for me either. I took out the hard drive out of my laptop and put it into my external hard drive case. I put it into my other laptop to see if it would recognize it. The laptop seems to recognize it as a Mass Storage Device, when I go to My Computer there is nothing. I'm assuming this is because the partitions no longer exist. Is there anything I can do to make this hard drive work again?
Hello, There are possibilities that your HDD is not working from the software side and its hardware side is working fine and if there was any problem regarding the hardware, then it would not have been detected by your laptop itself, Connect and format the hard disk manually from your laptop and make it a plane drive. And while connected to laptop, if you are operating a Win OS, then go to run and type diskmgmt.msc and press enter, there you will be able to view the different options of configuring your HDD Hope this helps
Use EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional for this time to get your data back and you can format it after you have secured the data. It works on all the windows versions . The partition table is easy to configure, Just go to google, do a quick search regarding partition making, download the partition making software, and there you go.
You probably screwed your primary partition when trying to install Linux. Since you had not provided enough information, I gotta make a guess that you opted for a Linux only files system like ext2 or ext3. Now windows can not recognize these file systems so when you connect your HDD to a windows system, although bios is able to detect it through firmware, windows can not read the partition table. If you need to recover your data, use any raw data recovery software, google it. Other wise, get a linux live CD/DVD, boot your computer with it and delete/convert your linux partition to FAT so windows can recognize it. Caution: There is a chance that you have already lost your partition data, if so deleting or converting primary partition wont recover your other partitions and it's really tricky to recover it. If you have important data on the HDD, you should go for professional recovery Disclaimer: I can not be held responsible if you fry your HDD, or lose your data, use common sense and caution if you chose to act on my suggestions
no probs if you are a new bie to this computer world, you have selected a very good version of linux, mint has got the best desktop prepared as said in the editors section about its amazing desktop configurations. You probably skipped the partition making while setting up the OS, if you can, re install the OS and this time pause and make the partitions and then proceed. You can also have another idea that install WindoWS OS (any version of widnows) and during the setup, it prompts to set the partitions. Bingo, go and set the partition limits and after the partitions are made, just dis continue the setup and you are out of there, Now start the linux installation. Guess this will go smooth ..