I am not sure if partitions were extended/logical in some way, I don't even know if that makes sense with GPT and it's not limited to MBR. Since I can see the files, I recovered /etc/fstab and /etc/lvm/, which indeed show that the system was configured using LVM. The fourth partition contains home folders and the last one contains the root.

The second partition is the boot partition, contains efi, grub2, vmlinuzs etc. The first partition contains EFI stuff, such as drwxr-xr-x 0 0 0 3 19:26 EFI If I look inside these partitions, using the P: list file command, I can see that 33 69 36), how do I interpret these values? Second question is related to the values displayed: there are 3 values in the start column (e.g. When I run a Quick Search (or even a full search), the tool finds some partitions, and among these there are 5 partitions that make sense: FAT32 0 32 33 33 69 36 532480 When starting, the tool finds this partition only: Disk /dev/sdb - 128 GB / 119 GiB - CHS 15566 255 63 So, first question: is Intel partition type a MBR? Why does EFI GPT not work even if the disk label is GPT? I tried searching for partitions with both types, but only Intel was successful.

I tried running testdisk, which identifies the partition table type to be Intel (and not EFI GPT). fdisk report the disklabel type to be gpt. So, in the disk with the OS, /dev/sdb, 128GB SSD, there is no partition table. The BIOS still detected the disks properly, so I started a LiveDVD to see what's going on.

So, somehow the partition table on my disk went bananas: at the next boot the system would not start, I got repeatedly kicked in the BIOS and I had no viable boot options.

Testdisk recover partition