On Sat, 2013-06-22 at 23:36 -0400, Gary Dale wrote: > If you have important data on the laptop, you should plug in an > external drive and dd the entire laptop drive to an image file on the > external drive (which must have at least as much free space as the > laptop drive's size). A very good advice, so the OP can try to recover it as often as needed, by dd'ing it back.