Partition table before defrag:
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2491 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1657 13309821 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2 1658 2491 6699105 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 1658 1688 248976 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda6 1689 1726 305203+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 1727 2081 2851506 83 Linux
/dev/hda8 2082 2491 3293293+ 83 Linux
During the defrag, there were no screen savers enabled, I was in safe mode,
and no other programs but defrag were loaded at the time and I let defrag do
its stuff overnight, then when I woke up, it said it was done and asked if I
wanted to exit it, and I said yes, and then I rebooted hoping to go back to
normal mode and only shown a grub prompt.
The partition table after a defrag ends up wiping out hda7, moving hda8's
start point to hda6's start point and thus making overlapping partitions.
(I checked that by typing rescue on the boot of the linux-mandrake CD and
typing "fdisk -l")
Since, I don't know much about command line options of grub and stuff, I
don't really know how to fix these things when it happens. I did have a
backup of the partition table that I saved on Norton AntiVirus rescue disks,
but restoring them didn't show the grub menu stuff, so I simply fdisk /mbr'd
(with the MSDOS fdisk) and then used removed the Non-DOS partitions (with
the MSDOS fdisk), rebooted, then reinstalled linux-mandrake to get it
working.
If a problem with the partition table happens, how do you get the ability to
boot back into linux without losing anything even when a restore of the
partition table and boot sector couldn't do that? I have no problem getting
back into windows (brutally with fdisk /mbr) but then I have no way of
getting back into my linux (and don't know how in grub) and I simply just
wipe out the linux partition and reinstall (partly because I didn't have
much important stuff on it at the time anyways).
