First of all I'd like to thank those who replied when I was very
concerned. A friend in need is a friend indeed!
Here's how I solved it:
- The output I had from fdisk was obtained from previous boots from
syslog, as I have "fdisk -l" in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local.
As I said fdisk was only giving me an error messagea afterwards and
no more.
- I used another clean disk drive with the same size and geometry
(geometry was what mattered, size could have been larger).
I created a partition table on the "mirror disk" using the output
from "fdisk -l" I had.
- Linux was somehow able to boot up, all I lost were partitions hda9 and
hda10 which were very important to me. I copied the other partitions
to the "mirror disk" as a precaution.
- I copied the new partition table from the "mirror disk" to my original
disk which contained hda9 and hda10 using
dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
and "voila" all was well again.
This did it.
Since I had another disk to play with I then managed to straighten out
my partition table eliminating the "different physical/logical"
messages.
Live long and prosper.
~
