These days, a large number of computer users are shifting their interest towards LINUX. The reason is quite obvious; LINUX is new to the computer world and is the most frequently upgraded operating system among its counterparts. Hence, users think that with LINUX, they get to use the most recent and advanced features. But, one problem that cause serious data loss in almost every operating system based computer is the corruption of the file system.

n a LINUX operating system, based computer, the 'superblock' is a record that keeps all the information about the file systems. These information include the size of the partition, block size used, size & location of the empty blocks as well as the occupied blocks, size & location of the inode tables etc. Apart from these, the superblock stores the size of disk block groups and usage information. Sometimes, this superblock gets corrupted and the operating system fails to access data from the hard drive.

In Linux, a user can install multiple operating systems on his/her system through GRUB. GRUB stands for GRand Unified Bootloader, which is an innovative boot loader package from GNU. With GRUB,

you can install any other operating system along with LINUX and perform many other tasks, such as viewing of disk partition details, temporarily re-mapping the disk order, altering partition settings, booting any user-defined configuration file, viewing the configuration of other boot loaders in GRUB supported file formats etc.

The concept of 'multi-boot' refers to a system that can boot from two or more different operating systems. A multi-boot or dual-boot system allows you to avail the features of multiple operating systems, while working from a single computer. Sometimes, when you try to make a dual boot system with different flavors of LINUX distribution, the meta data storing the partition information gets corrupted. Such damage or corruption to the partition structure results into the inaccessibility of all the data in the hard drive partitions and you need to take the help of any LINUX data recovery software to recover the data back.

Under such situations, you may come across the below error message on your screen:

“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 error message, though the system may successfully boot, but it fails to show the hard drive partitions. Moreover, if you will try to run the ‘fdisk’ utility, it shows another long list of error messages. The error message that you may receive can be read as below:

For easy and effective management of your valuable data in Linux, it could be useful to use related but varying set of files on separate memory locations. You, however, might prefer to see the relevant files together. In such cases, unioning the file system allows you to keep these files separate physically, but merge them logically in single view. This is possible through UnionFS command.

In Linux computers, dd (data definition) command-line utility offers several advantages such as converting raw data or low-level copying of data from hard drive to any other storage media. The command is used to copy the file system and is capable of copying specified number of data blocks or bytes. Furthermore, this tool allows you to copy data blocks rearwards, so that in case of any problem in block at some point, data that is stored after and before string would be copied.

LVM or Logical Volume Manager for Linux is responsible for managing mass-storage devices like disk drives. It allows you to add or replace disks, resize disk partition, take snapshots and resize dynamic volumes etc. LVM metadata holds critical system information and if it gets corrupted, you cannot access the stored data.

Linux Root directory is the initial point, from where the system starts looking for the files stored on the hard disk. Each file and folder that you store on your Linux-based system is marked under this root directory. It is denoted by ‘/’. The Linux root directory further subdivides into subdirectories in hierarchical form.

fstab (also referred as file system table) is an important system configuration file in Linux. Located at /etc/fstab, this file lists all available disk and disk partitions. This file is used to determine disk initialization information and is usually used by mount command. Generally, while booting if system prompts that it cannot open fstab file, it indicates that the file system is corrupt.

A UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) Linux Kernel automatically searches and maps the volumes to the storage media. This 128 bit UUID ('UUID=1afaaf75-96df-46e2-9305-7f30823619d2') also enables you to update /etc/fstab file and make hard disk management simpler. To view the UUID of your hard drive, “sudo vol_id /dev/sdo1” command is used.