Linux Community Magazine

The hard drives can be divided in one or more parts, known as partitions. The division of hard drive is described in partition table, stored in sector 0 of hard drive. Linux operating system requires at least one hard drive partition, namely for the root file system. It may use the swap files and swap partitions, however the latter are quite efficient. Thus, generally you may want second Linux hard drive partition devoted as the swap partitions. In some cases, improper use of hard drive management tools can cause data loss and need Linux Data Recovery to be sorted out.

On the Intel hardware, the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) that boots up your system and can generally only access first 1024 cylinders of hard drive. Due to the same, you may need to create third hard drive partitions if your hard drive is large in size. This partitions is generally mounted on the /boot, for storing kernel image and some auxiliary files required at boot time, so that BIOS can access them.

You can create the manipulate the partition table in Linux using a menu drive program, known as fdisk. However, this tool can not understand the GPT (GUID Partition Table) and is not work with large partitions. Fdisk understands DOS partition table and BSD/SUN disklabels.

The Fdisk automatically obtains the hard drive geometry, if possible. It is not inevitably physical disk geometry (as modern hard drive don't actually have physical geometry), but is disk geometry that is used for DOS type partition tables.

Generally everything works fine if only the Linux operating system is installed on your drive. But, in dual-boot configuration, you should let the Fdisk from other operating system create at least one partitions. While booting the Linux operating system, it considers partition table and attempts to derive what geometry is needed for effective cooperation with another operating system.

Before you proceed for any operation on your hard drive, it is recommended to create complete backup of your significant data. When you backup data using dd command, you need to be careful. A minor mistake may cause severe data loss and need Data Recovery Linux to be handled.

Linux Data Recovery is possible with the help of powerful third-party tools, known as Linux Recovery Software. The applications are particularly designed to carry out thorough scan of the drive and extract lost, missing, and inaccessible data from it.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is the most advanced tool for absolute recovery. The software recovers data from Ext4, Ext3, Ext2, FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12 file system volumes. It is compatible with all major distributions of Linux operating system including Red Hat, Debian, SUSE, and Fedora.