OMG i think i killed my system

[LT72884]

ok, please help me. i was in the console and typed photorec and i did a search for delelted partitions and when i saw how many there where on my disk i didnt want to screw any thing up, so i exited the program like the tutorial showed me and now my system wont go pass the login screen. i log in and it restarts my system. wtf happened to my system. i didnt delete any partitions, all i did was search. and now it says cant open i/o no space left to write to.

[LT72884]

yeah i have more detail about the error. my hdd is 30GB and used is 1.2gb for my install. well halfway threw the search of lost partitions it says i/o module error. no space left to write to harddisk. apparently photorec is NOT supposed to write to the drive but it did and ait took 28.8GB with it and my system.

[OErjan]

Koppix wont alow you to wreck system without YOU taking active decisions to do so.
and mounting NTFS filesystm as read/write is one such action (XP has that filesystem, atleast that is most likely).

for Knoppix to do bad things you have to first mount the partition read write OR do it as root (su or sudo) which is unwise, NEVER do anything as ROOT unless you KNOW what you are doing (that is read some before doing anyhing).
In linux (and other unixlike systms) root=GOD! you can even erase firmware and delete bios as root, nevermind small things like destroying filesystems and such.


Enoug ranting,
wee need to know what you did BEFORE you started the scan and what options/settings... you did, every single step. if you do not know these, hmm, things may be hard to recover, nothing is impossible though but, hard.

EDIT
hmm, as tutorial showed you?? what tutorial, what where the nstructons? if you saved changes you may have a hard task infront of you restoring things.
/EDIT

[LT72884]

this tutorial was from cgsecurity.org about how to use testdisk and photorec that i found here at this forum. here is the steps i exactly did.

i turned on my pc, loged into the system using my user name.
went to the konsole and typed photorec.
message came up saying maximize terminal window cuz photorec needs at least 21 lines to operate. so i maixmized the window.
photorec told me to select drive, so i selected my 30gb drive that had 28.8gb free space on it
next it said choose partition type so i selected intel/pc becasue its not a mac partition.
then it brought up the screen that said this on it

Disk /dev/hda -30GB

Partition start end size in sectors

D empty whole disk
1 * linux
2 P linux
3 P linux

i would write the numbers down but im not sure if they are the same as they where before the catastrophic event.
so i selected the D empty partiton and then hit search. after that it got about half way threw the disk, maybe a lil more and thats when the error came up. im thinkin that it recovered 28.8 gb of deleted files and stored them on my drive and now i have to go in and delete them. but the tutorial said that photorec would never ever write to the HDD and so i emailed the dude who created the program and his responses are very limited and vague. here is his response to my issue

Looks like you haven't used the good program:
- PhotoRec is designed to recover lost files,
- TestDisk to recover lost partitions.

Bye,
Christophe

how is that supposed to help me. lol. any way thats the steps i took to kill my system. my box wont even let me run knoppix off cd any more. i select cd rom as my boot device in bios and also during post but the grub loader keeps coming up saying i need to select one of these two os's to continue. niether of them are the cd. any way thanx in advance and in the meant time im gonna try just login into debian text from the grub and see if i can view me HDD

[LT72884]

i think i fixed it.

i went into debian text shell and went into my user folder and noticed about 150+ files named recup.dir.1-159 on there and it was in a folder named photorec ses.
i did a df command and it couldnt read my filesystem and so i used a du -s (i think it was an s) and it said used was 22GB.
so i did the rm -f recup.dir.* -R command and got rid of them and now it says used 21MB and i can log in now.

[OErjan]

ah, you used console well, this is one reason i like linux, mostly things CAN be remedied but may take some thime/effort. and even a seemingly dead system can often be booted in runlevel 1 (root admin mode)

[LT72884]

yeah i used the console and i think it fixed my system. i guess the GUI couldnt load all of its files and read/write to the drive anymore due to the photorec which was NOT supposed to write to the drive