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I used to have a 1TB HDD with Win7 and Ubuntu 12.04 on dual boot. Few weeks ago I bought an SSD and installed on Dual Boot a Win7 and Ubuntu 12.04. From the new Ubuntu system I was able to access the data in old Linux ext4 partition. Yesterday I decided to delete the old Win7 partition so I formatted the old Win7 partition and the 100MB partition reserved file system. Now I cant access anymore the old Ubuntu Partition from the new Ubuntu. So I tried to boot from Live CD and restore the grub in the HDD. The command fdisk -l give me [I disconnected the SSD before booting from Live CD] the following output:

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
224 heads, 19 sectors/track, 459004 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xea3fb49a

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048   307197951   153597952    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2   *   307200000   819199999   256000000    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       819202046  1953523711   567160833    5  Extended
/dev/sda5      1938425856  1953523711     7548928   82  Linux swap / Solaris

The Ubuntu partition is sda3 that become tagged as Extended after old Win7 removal while before was tagged as Linux.

After that I lauched the command

sudo grub-install /dev/sda3

and it gives me /usr/sbin/grub-probe: error: cannot find a device for /boot/grub (is /dev mounted?).

so I tried with sudo mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

and it gives me that NTFS signature is missing. Failed to mount '/dev/sda3': Invalid argument The device '/dev/sda3' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

I'm not interested in running this OS again I'm only interested to access the file in that partition from the Ubuntu on the SSD.

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  • Your Ubuntu partition is not, and probably never was, /dev/sda3. If the type code had somehow gotten changed, then the altered /dev/sda3 would not contain any other partitions, but it does -- /dev/sda5 can only be a logical partition within /dev/sda3. Rather, you probably had a Linux partition stored as another logical partition within the existing /dev/sda3, and it was somehow lost. It's good that your attempt to install GRUB to /dev/sda3 failed, because a success on that score could easily have made matters worse. (GRUB should not be installed to extended partitions.)
    – Rod Smith
    May 31, 2014 at 18:28

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Not a very technical Ubuntu user here, but I have just recovered an Ubuntu partition and I may help you with your problem. I think it may be a bit overkill for your case, but here it goes.

If the problem is that you cannot access a partition properly, you can try rewriting the partition table with TestDisk. You can use it in Ubuntu and in Windows. This program is useful to discover disappeared partitions and to rewrite their status. In this case it should be quite simple: run testdisk, analyze sda (first option) and change the status of your Ubuntu partition to "logical". Then it should be accessible from your bootable Ubuntu. Since your partitions are not hidden, it should not take you more than a couple of minutes.

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  • Thanks! Using TestDisk I manage to set the partition status to "primary" and now it's accessible.
    – user287069
    May 31, 2014 at 15:37

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