Hi, I'm having a problem that appears to be the inverse of what some people here have had before. The partition tables on BOTH my disks, as linux sees them, are screwed up. However, if you boot dos or windows 95 from the hard disks (via lilo, which still works), both dos and w95 still have an accurate idea of the partition information and work fine. I guess they're using a copy of the partition table as opposed to the real thing.
So: Is there some way I can get DOS to write its idea of the partition info back out to the main partition table? (in the boot sector?) Just in case anyone is contemplating this setup -- I strongly suspect that using any_d.b in conjunction with windows 95 is what got me into this mess. I have dos, and a couple of linux filesystems on my first drive, and w95 plus the rest of my linux filesystems on my second drive. I use any_d.b to boot windoze 95. W95 was originally installed by making the second drive the primary, installing it, and then switching it back to being the secondary. It seems to run just fine, but I suspect that it's somehow now completely happy. I found the partition tables on both my disks trashed after installing a bunch of software in w95. Note that if you boot dos from a floppy, it sees the same trashed partition info as linux does. If you try to boot linux, the kernel loads, and then gets very unhappy when it tries to mount the root filesystem. (Issues lots of invalid seeks and such.) Am I correct in suspecting fidsk /mbr will NOT cure my problem? (I worry that it will copy the bad partition table over the good one...) Unfortunately, the dos fdisk doesn't show me the partion info in enough detail for me to just be able to use this info to reconstruct the linux one. If anyone had any ideas how to cure this, I'd really appreciate hearing from you. I have a whole bunch of data I'd really rather not lose. Many thanks, -Arup Mukherjee ([EMAIL PROTECTED])