GPT Partitions

Linux and Unix-Like Red Hat
1

(Don't you hate being on holiday and being the only IT person in the family?)

Got a wonderful thanksgiving surprise .. dead windows-8 laptop with "important" unbacked-up data. No worries, I have my my fedora labtop and a magical SATA to USB converter. Plugged in the drive, and ... can't mount the damn filesystem. What manner of evil is this?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

(maybe I should've gone to work today)

2

Are you trying to list them with fdisk -l ? It won't show GPT properly, but parted will.

Checking if there's a kernel module you need to load. [edit] Try modprobe efivars

3

If it was in a state of hibernation/suspend or updating, you might be only able to mount the disk in read-only mode.

gdisk is the gpt pendant to fdisk.

yum info gdisk
Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit
Installed Packages
Name        : gdisk
Arch        : x86_64
Version     : 0.8.10
Release     : 2.fc20
Size        : 659 k
Repo        : installed
From repo   : updates
Summary     : An fdisk-like partitioning tool for GPT disks
URL         : http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/
License     : GPLv2
Description : An fdisk-like partitioning tool for GPT disks. GPT fdisk features a
            : command-line interface, fairly direct manipulation of partition table
            : structures, recovery tools to help you deal with corrupt partition
            : tables, and the ability to convert MBR disks to GPT
4

Assuming you can remove the hard disk and can attach it to another working Windows system, you will save yourself countless hours of work and headache by using a utility like R-Drive Image to carve out the good data. Remember, Linux NTFS support is unreliable.

Yes, you can use efivars to fix up UEFI variables and gdisk to fix up GPT partitions but remember Windows 8 also uses a BCD store. If that is what is damaged you will have to use BCDedit to rebuild or repair it.

Finally, not to be the naysayer, but you can easy brick many current versions of UEFI firmware using efivars or similar tools.

5

Thanks everyone. I ended up removing the harddisk from my laptop and installing the disk from the dead laptop.