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Clonezilla accidentally deleted partition table of disk containing veracrypt encrypted data partitions. Any advice for restoring them?

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Rora P
2020-01-16
2020-01-26
  • Rora P

    Rora P - 2020-01-16

    I use a clonezilla script/option in grub to automate the image restore process for one of my unencrypted OS drives. For some reason the target drive (sdc) was not detected during POST the one time and clonezilla ended up trying to restore to the newly assigned sdc drive (formerly sdd). It threw a GPT/size error before writing the data itself so sdd's drive contents should still be recoverable (i hope).

    sdd contained 5 veracrypt encrypted partitions of various sizes split over 4TB. These partitions were created with minitool partition wizard and then formatted/encrypted using veracrypt. The partition layout was formerly visible to the OS but now the disk just shows up as an unformatted MBR drive with 2 partitions (2TB & 1.8TB).

    Since i panic rebooted before grabbing the original clonezilla log, here's an approximation taken from an attempt to manually recreate the same conditions of the screwup on a different disk:

    Clean filesystem header in device /dev/sdd1...
    Clean filesystem header in device /dev/sdd2...
    Clean filesystem header in device /dev/sdd3...
    Clean filesystem header in device /dev/sdd4...
    /dev/sdd4: 4 bytes were erased at offset 0x000001c6 (atari): b9 d3 d8 fa
    Clean filesystem header in device /dev/sdd5...
    Trying to clean the MBR and GPT partition table on the destination disk first: /dev/sdd
    Informing the OS of partition table changes... done !
    Non-grub bootloader found on /tmp/sdc-rolling-backup-tmp-cnvted/sdd-mbr...
    The CHS value of hard drive from EDD will be used for sfdisk.
    Sfdisk >= 2.26 does not support C/H/S option. Skip using C/H/S option.
    Error: /dev/sdd: unrecognised disk label
    **************************
    Tue Jan 7 14:36:24 UTC 2020
    Writing the partition table...
    No partition table exists in target disk /dev/sdd, try to initialize one so that we can get the disk
     size by parted... Running: parted -s /dev/sdd mklabel msdos
    done !
    Warning!! Destination disk (/dev/sdd) size is 4.00TB, which is larger than the MBR partition table
     entry maximum 2 TiB (~2.2 TB). You have to use GUID partition table format (GPT).
    Press "Enter" to continue......
    

    i cloned the drive to another disk with ddrescue/knoppix and ran testdisk "deeper analysis" on the clone. it did find something but the sizes don't make too much sense to me (i'm no testdisk expert). Here's the testdisk log on pastebin and this is what i see on screen:

    Disk /dev/sdd - 4000 GB / 3726 GiB - CHS 486401 255 63
    | Partition | Start | End | Size in sectors
    | --- | --- | --- | ---
    | >D MS Data | 264192 | 7814035455 | 7813771264
    | ]D MS Data | 1973193639 | 1977629664 | 4436026 [~?~IiM-k M-8~6M-#
    | ]
    D MS Data | 1973193640 | 1977629665 | 4436026 [~?~IiM-k M-8~6M-#
    | D MS Data | 4851368994 | 4851771756 | 402763 [
    | D MS Data | 4851368995 | 4851771757 | 402763 [

    Here are the original partition size approximations as best i can remember them. feel pretty sure that last one was either 63.7 or 67.3 GB:

    sdd1: 300-350 GB
    sdd2: 350GB - 1.0TB
    sdd3: 1.1-1.3 TB
    sdd4: <1.0 TB
    sdd5: 62-68 GB
    

    and the grub entry that caused the screwup:

    set isofile="/clonezilla/clonezilla-live-2.6.0-37-amd64.iso"
    loopback loop (hd2,5)$isofile
    linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live live-config noswap nolocales union=overlay edd=on nomodeset ocs_prerun=\"mount /dev/sdb5 /mnt\" ocs_prerun1=\"mount --bind /mnt/clonezilla /home/partimag/\" ocs_live_run=\"ocs-sr -e1 auto -e2 -r -batch -j2 -nogui -v -scr -p poweroff restoredisk sdc-rolling-backup sdc\" ocs_live_extra_param=\"\" keyboard-layouts=\"\" ocs_live_batch=\"yes\" locales=\"\" vga=788 ip=frommedia nosplash toram=filesystem.squashfs findiso=$isofile
    initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img
    

    Completely my own damn fault (and not clonezilla's) for not predicting this could happen. this post about a successful recovery) has got my hopes up but i'm clueless about disk recovery and some help would be appreciated. I'm here for any clarifications you may need.

     

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