Fixing “This Doesn’T Look Like A Partition Table…” Error Message
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Fixing “This doesn’t look like a partition table…” Error Message

A Linux hard drive is divided into primary (boot) partitions, swap partitions, and logical partitions. Entries of all these partitions are saved in a ‘partition table’. Corruption in partition table primarily occurs due to improper system shutdown, human errors, virus infection, and file system corruption. Once a partition table is corrupted, you receive a boot error message, which makes the system unbootable.

In such situations, the data stored in your hard drive becomes inaccessible. To overcome any such boot error message and to access hard drive data, a user needs to restore data from an updated backup. However, if no backup is available or it falls short of restoring required data, then s/he needs to opt for a commercial Linux Data Recovery application.

To elaborate the above problem, consider a practical scenario where you boot your Linux system and encounter:

“This doesn’t look like a partition table Probably you selected the wrong device.”

After the above error message, the system freezes and becomes unbootable leading to inaccessibility of hard drive data. In addition, this error is repeated on every attempt made to boot your system.

Cause:

The fundamental cause for the occurrence of the above error message is corruption of partition table.

Resolution:

To overcome the above partition table corruption error message and to access the hard drive data, you will need to reinstall the operating system. The process of re-installation will allow you to create new partitions and store fresh data in them. However, re-installation also deletes data from all the partitions. To overcome this, and to access lost data saved in partitions, you need to search for an effective Linux Data Recovery software.

A Linux Recovery tool uses effective scanning procedure to scan a formatted Linux hard drive and recover lost partitions. A recovery tool also recovers specified files from a particular recovered partition.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is a comprehensive solution to recover lost, deleted, and formatted Linux hard drive partitions. This Linux Recovery application supports Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, and FAT file systems, and recovers data from IDE, EIDE, SATA, and other types of hard drives. Compatible with almost all kinds of Linux distributions, including SlackWare, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandrake, and SUSE, this read only software is easy-to-use, and operate, and thereby ensures complete recovery of all your data. It has been incorporated with high-end, yet safe, algorithms, apart from various power-packed Recovery features like, SMART, Disk Imaging, Save Scan, and more.

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