Here's the problem: The machine I've got to recover is an IBM Thinkpad R32 of which the Windows partition was resized by Partition magic to accomodate a Linux installation (mandrake 9.2). When it was upgraded to mandrake 10 windows XP won't boot up so an attempt was made to fix the problem - unfortunately using `sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread --force -H255 /dev/hda` as I thought it was reminiscent of the Fedora Core 2 issue some months back as Mandrake 10 uses linux kernel 2.6.
Unfortunately this didn't seem to alleviate the problem one bit as it further escalated the problem as now I can't access the partition containing the root filesystem. Here's how the partition order is: hda1 (ntfs) | hda3 (/boot, ext3) | hda5 (swap) | hda6 (/, ext3) | hda2 (IBM recovery, vfat) Fortunately I've been able to find the rest of the partitions except for hda6. gpart doesn't help much as the latest version of gpart can't seem to find the partition type signature of hda6. I'm not sure if the fact that the linux partitions were accomodated using partition magic is a culprit, but I haven't encountered yet such setups until now. I've already found the rest of the partitions (fortunately I made a backup of the partition table in paper), but I still can't mount or fsck the contents of /dev/hda6's filesystem. Any hints as to how I could find where the partition started and ended? When I tried `cat /dev/hda6` I could still see the filenames along with the binary content. I'm not sure if I made a mistake with finding the sizes of the rest of the partitions which might be the reason why I can't find where /dev/hda6 started (and the next problem would be finding where the filesystem superblock resided inside /dev/hda6). Paolo Alexis Falcone [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
