This might be quite the hopeless case, so I posted another method that is simpler, but still need some help with.

Will this backup the partition contents of both linux and windows?

Here is the background:

I've recently resized a partition (/sda2 to make another partition, /sda1) on a disk where Windows 8 and KDE Linux Mint are installed on. A whole lot of things went wrong.

First, the computer wouldn't boot past BIOS and gave me grub rescue. With a Live Linux USB I used the boot-repair app to reinstall grub (on /sda). Thankfully linux booted from the new grub2 menu, but windows would crash when trying to load. When looking into it more on linux I found that apps like KDE Partition Manager and GParted both couldn't read the partition on my /sda disk.

KDE Partition Manager gives me "No valid partition was found on this device".
GParted gives me the whole thing is unallocated, and "unable to satisfy all constraints on the partiton".

I then installed another app, FixParts. That gave me the following:

Warning: 0xEE partition doesn't start on sector 1. This can cause problems

in some OSes.

and

Disk size is 250069680 sectors (119.2 GiB)

MBR disk identifier: 0x0FB1A4FB

MBR partitions:



                                                   Can Be   Can Be

Number  Boot  Start Sector   End Sector   Status   Logical  Primary   Code

   1                    63       192779   primary     Y        Y      0x07

   2      *         208839    134062424   logical     Y        Y      0x07

   5             134066176    234067967   logical     Y        Y      0x83

   6             234067968    250068991   primary              Y      0x82

fdisk -l gave me this:

Disk /dev/sda: 128.0 GB, 128035676160 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 15566 cylinders, total 250069680 sectors

Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x0fb1a4fb



   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sda1              63      192779       96358+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sda2   *      208839   134062424    66926793    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

/dev/sda3       134066175   250068991    58001408+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/sda5       134066176   234067967    50000896   83  Linux

/dev/sda6       234067968   250068991     8000512   82  Linux swap / Solaris

where sda1 is just an empty NTFS partition, sda2 contains my Windows 8, sda5 is Linux /(root). /home is on another disk.

I want to keep my data. And I want my Windows 8 and Linux to be on the same disk because it's an SSD. If possible I would also like both Grub and Windows boot files to be on the same disk, but that's a different issue.

First I thought the problem was "0xEE partition doesn't start on sector 1", but now I'm not so sure. My other disks (i got 3) give the same error, but the partition apps can read them. However, I remember seeing the boot-repair app reinstalling grub2 on every disk, so maybe that's related. Also, now I see that Windows 8 partition (/dev/sda2) is logical??? Windows cannot boot from logical, so it couldn't have been before. How can I even change that without loosing the data on it?

Really detailed info from boot-repair app.