With technological advancement, now you can install and use more than one operating system in a single computer. This type of configuration, which is known as dual-boot, offers you to enjoy the features of multiple operating systems. However, sometimes, while making dual boot systems with different Linux operating systems the metadata structure gets corrupted. This kind of corruption results in the loss or inaccessibility of your valuable data and the need for advanced Linux data recovery arises to recover the data back.

In order to configure your system as dual-boot with another flavor of Linux, you are trying to install Fedora Core and come around a threatening error message. The error can be read as below:

"The partition table on device is corrupted. To create new partitions it must be initialized, causing the loss of all data on this drive"

After encountering the above error, the system may boot without any visible problem. However, if you go to the System Tools → Hardware browser, you will find out that the usual green bar for the hard drive is no longer there. The system is not showing the hard drive volumes and if you run the utility 'fdisk' on the drive, you may get a long set of messages. The messages that you receive, can be stated as follows:

"Disk /dev/hdc: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes

16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 193821 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order"

Cause:

From the first error message as well as the the second one, it is almost sure that there is a possible corruption to the partition table of your system.

In Linux systems, partition table contains all the vital information about the hard drive partitions and these information are indeed extremely necessary for the operating system to access and manage the partitions. Therefore, if there occurs any problem to the partition table, data in the drive becomes completely inaccessible.

You can resolve the partition table corruption problems by formatting the hard drive and making a fresh installation of Linux. With formatting all your data from the drive will be erased and you need to restore them from a valid backup. However, if you do not have any valid backup, the only way to recover your valuable data back from the Linux hard drive is to run any efficient data recovery Linux software.