oaridus
Thank you @sybok and @robin for the response. I normally take out the SD card before doing any installation to protect my data. But because previous multiple installations of AntiX-23.2 did not mess up the SD Card, I become overconfident. My Bad!!
The good news is that I regularly backup my data every 2-3 months in an external hard drive. Out of the recent work and changes done, some I had backed up in my Google Drive online too. So I will not lose a lot of it if in case nothing works.
While installing, I am very careful to check multiple times to ensure only the correct partition is used. In this case, I got a confirmation page before installing antiX-26 that EFI and Swap will be reused without formatting, and root (/) will be formatted – all in internal MMC card. No mention of the SD card. But in the previous page where you do the selection of the partitions, a “gpt” tag was there in front of the SD card. Not knowing what it is, I ignored it.
My previous experience shows that it just messed up the partition table sector of the SD Card. The data should be intact as robin says. I will try to first take an image of the Card and then proceed with gdisk and testdisk. I found “Image a Partition” in the Disk section of the Control Center. It does show the SD Card and asks for location to copy the image. Alternatively, I will also check out dd and ddrescue commands. Will update you soon.
- This reply was modified 4 months ago by oaridus.