"No Bootable Device" Issue on Acer Aspire One

agelade · 03-01-2011, 11:49 AM

I know this question has been asked, but I didn't find an answer, or perhaps I didn't look hard enough. Forwards to threads I may have missed are appreciated.

I followed the advice on this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...device-765120/

Here's what I've got and what I've done.

I've got an Acer Aspire One, running Jolicloud. I didn't do anything to it at all that should have changed anything, so when I got the pxe-mof dealie, I checked the cabling and overall stability of the SSD drive first. It's fine, doesn't wiggle, nothing's disconnected. So I made a USB key so I could boot a live session and maybe at least get some of my docs off my laptop before trying to fix or scrapping it. I booted a live session, couldn't get online, but I could get to a terminal, so now I'm command line. I did dmesg |grep -i sd per some advice in this thread, and I can see both my 8 gig ssd and the 4 gig USB drive I'm booting from, so I guess my hard drive is okay?

Then I did fdisk -l.
I see /dev/sda - 8 gigs, must be my hard drive. Info about it, then the line "Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain a valid partition table".

Then I see /dev/sdb - 4 gigs, must be the USB i'm booting from. Info about it, then a table. Let me type it, but I'll do a side by side rather than try to format the table here:
Device: /dev/sdb1
Boot: *
Start: 1
End: 698
Blocks: 714752
Id: 17
System: Hidden HPFS/NTFS

Then info for /dev/sdb1 - 731 MB, no idea what it is. Boot sector for the USB drive?

Then another table for /dev/sdb1p1, which I also can't identify. But it goes like:
Device: /dev/sdb1p1
Boot: *
Start: 1
End: 698
Blocks: 714752
Id: 17
System: Hidden HPFS/NTFS

My first goal is to fix this, to get my jolicloud booting up again and back to normal. If this isn't possible, I would like some advice navigating the file system through the terminal to move a few of my locally saved documents to my SD card. I hope what I've given you is useful. I tried to pick out the stuff that looked most important.

Thanks much,
Lisa

TobiSGD · 03-01-2011, 12:26 PM

If you want us to help you to fix your SSD it would be better to show us the info of fdisk -l regarding your SSD, not your USB. So please show us the output for /dev/sda.

agelade · 03-01-2011, 12:44 PM

Okay! I'm typing this out, so bear with me if I typo. Here's the output for fdisk -l that pertains to my SSD.

Disk /dev/sda: 8096 MB, 8069677056 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 981 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xff020202

Disk /dev/sda doesn't contain a valid partition table

Then it goes into /dev/sdb info, which is the USB.

Thanks!

TobiSGD · 03-01-2011, 01:43 PM

Seems to me that your partition table is corrupted. You can try to recover that with the tool testdisk. If that doesn't work, you can try photorec to try to recover your data (comes with testdisk).
For more info on how to use those programs see

Code:

man testdisk

and

Code:

man photorec

Tip for the future: Always have a backup of your important data.

agelade · 03-02-2011, 12:15 PM

Thanks very much. testdisk wasn't able to fix the partition, but photorec did recover all of my files. I really only needed a couple, so that was fun, finding those couple in the 100s of thousands photorec recovered. Heh. I usually work on the cloud - this was a confluence of miserable circumstances involving airport wifi and rushed transportation. Disaster strikes the one time you haven't prepared, etc.

Anyway, I've got my stuff off and I'm ready to format and reinstall. Now the trick is that the jolicloud installer is saying my drive isn't partitioned properly (I had been hoping the installer would take care of that for me) and that I should go manually set that up. I haven't yet googled how to do that.

Thanks for all your help!

-Lisa

TobiSGD · 03-02-2011, 12:57 PM

If you have recovered your files, you had luck. You can bring your internal drive to somewhat like a factory setting, by zeroing out the MBR and partition table. You can do that like this, as root, from your USB system:

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

After that, Jolicloud should have no problems to partition the disk.

agelade · 03-03-2011, 08:50 AM

I did dd, it seemed to do something.

1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes (512 B) copied, 0.0984076 s, 5.2 kB/s

So I tried to reinstall jolicloud and I'm getting what I got before. I took some pictures of the errors with my phone.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...302_180048.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...302_180108.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...302_180525.jpg

The last message recommends that I go back to the partition menu, I suppose to set it up myself. I go to the advanced partitioning menu, and get to a thing that looks like this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...303_094302.jpg

I'm in a twitter conversation with jolicloud support right now since this now seems to be more about figuring out the jolicloud advanced partition part of the install process, but if you have any other advice, I'm happy to hear it.

Thanks for all of your help.