If it looks bad, then it is probably worse

I was not planning on spending hours to fix this, but now I had no choice. I loaded a live version of Sabayon; it seemed that I could not see the Sabayon partitions. I loaded a live version of Mint and I could see the partition but could not do anything with it.

I downloaded System Rescue CD. I could see the partition but I could not mount it. This is where I really screwed things up. I tried to use fsck and some other utilities; I was getting nowhere. I discovered that some of these changes are only seen after a reboot.
The next time I rebooted I got a message that looked like it was a blank hard drive. Now Windows was not recognized!

I did some research and as a last ditch attempt I tried Testdisk. I ran the utility and it too was announcing that some super blocks did not match. I did a scan; it did not find all my drives. I chose the option to do a deep scan and left it running overnight. The next day I could see dozens of drives listed I went through and found the ones that had my data on them and lo and behold I was able to make back ups of my Sabayon data and Windows data and extract them into a backup.

I followed the screen prompts, which were not very descriptive, but now I had my data so I was not too concerned. When I rebooted, Testdisk had fixed my Windows boot partition. I still could not boot Sabayon but at this point I was going to reinstall Sabayon.

If you have a similar issue to what I have described I highly recommend this utility. I was really sceptical that testdisk would work, but it really did and allowed me to recover my data. Testdisk is available for Linux and Windows If I have an issue or asked to fix an issue with a hard drive, I will reach for testdisk.

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