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.

A UUID error message mainly occurs when you attempt to boot your system after partitioning the hard drive or adding a new hard drive. Once the UUID error message appears, the system becomes unbootable and hard drive data becomes inaccessible. For complete recovery and restoration of data, in case of no availability of backup, you need to use advanced Linux Data Recovery tools.

As a practical scenario, you have two operating systems (Windows Vista and Ubuntu) installed on your system. You now want to install a new operating system Fedora 9 on your system. To do so, you decide to share it with Ubuntu, instead of creating a new /home partition. After the installation is complete, when you attempt to boot ‘Fedora 9’, the below error message gets encountered:

“'Checking filesystems' stage: fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve 'UUID=1afaaf75-96df-46e2-9305-7f30823619d2'”

Cause:

The above error message mainly occurs due to inconsistency in the UUIDs. After the above error message appears, the data saved in Ubuntu based hard drive becomes inaccessible.

Resolution:

To resolve the above issue, you need to firstly check the /etc/fstab to see whether all the mount points of the UUIDs are mentioned correctly. If the UUIDs are not mentioned correctly, then there is corruption or inconsistency in UUIDs. In such situations, the most effective way to resolve the issue is reinstalling Ubuntu operating system. A clean reinstall of Ubuntu operating system erases all the formally stored data from your hard drive. In such situations, you need to use advanced Linux Data Recovery tools.

Such Linux Recovery tools provide absolute and systematic scan and recovery of data by incorporating effective scanning methods. These recovery utilities provide highly intuitive user interface that makes them easy-to-understand. In addition, these recovery utilities also recover and restore data after issues like superblock corruption, group descriptors faults and inode table damage.

Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery is the most reliable Linux Recovery tool. It is compatible with Ext2, Ext3 and ReiserFS file system based Linux volumes. This read only Data Recovery Linux utility gets installed on Windows (Vista, XP, 2003 and 2000) and the affected Linux drive should be connected as slave.