partition table corrupted

[Daniel E. Hollis]

On boot, I get this error:
"Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /deb/hda#
Could this be a zero-length partition?"


Indeed, my partitions in the extended partion aren't looking too good - a bad id on the first (hda5), incorrect length, and no record of hda6 through hda8. Thankfully, my root is on hda2 and booting. 1 and 3 are dos, 4 is marked "extended", so I don't know if that's an abstract type partition, but I thought I remembered it being my swap partition (which is also missing). Lilo is working fine.

Anyone have any advice? Lilo saves a copy of the mbr, iirc - maybe it also saves a copy of the partition table? (Where?). Since I have the starting sector of the lost partition, is there data in the beginning of the partition that would let me deduce the length of the partition?

Dan