Mhac Janapin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Can one be so stupid as to corrupt his own partition table? Yes. That > was me last night. :( > > I have two HDs. Disk 1 has WinXP (system and data in separate > paritions) and Gentoo Linux (/boot / and swap). No problem with this > one though. > > The second disk has > /dev/hdb1 Reiser4 with data in it.(primary) > /dev/hdb2 Reiserfs with XandrOS in it. (primary) > /dev/hdb3 Extended > /dev/hdb4 Slack10 Reiserfs(primary) > /dev/hdb5 Swap (logical) > /dev/hdb6 Novell Desktop Linux 9 Reiserfs (logical) > And this is where my problem lies. > > I was planning to convert /dev/hdb2 to FAT32 so that both Windows and > the other Linuxes can read/write on it. And so, I moved everything to > /dev/hdb2 for the meantime (7.1GB worth of data). I was in gentoo. > Sadly, I don't have mkfs.vfat installed so rebooted to XP. > > I fired up ControlPanel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management. Then > I went to Disk Management. There, I deleted /dev/hdb1 and tried > formatting it to FAT32. After it is done; it refreshed and the whole > Disk is gone!!!
Let me get this straight: you wanted to convert /dev/hdb2, but you nuked /dev/hdb1 instead? In Windows too? <shudder> Egad, that's a waste! Or perhaps you mean converting */dev/hda1* and nuking it, gleaning from your table above... > I kept myself from cursing M$ and myself... I rebooted to gentoo and > fdisk -l /dev/hdb gives me nothing. sfdisk -d /dev/hdb dumps the > partitions in hdb but with errors about overlapping ... thank God the > Disk is still there. I can still boot Novell Linux and Slack 10; I can > also mount them while in Gentoo. However hdb1 and hdb2 are lost in > oblivion. If I just fdisk /dev/hdb, it gives me seek error. It says > "unseekable"... :( And that would be indeed unseekable, since the partition table has borked. IIRC the way to go here is to rebuild those partitions via fdisk, but that requires you to know *exactly* (sector-wise) where the parts begin and end. > Here are the some options I gleaned from searches I made this morning: > 1)Try GnuParted > 2)Partition Magic > 3)sfdisk (but the problem is, i don't have the original info about the > beginning and ending of each sectors). Had you have a backup copy of fdisk -l /dev/hdb *before* doing the hack, you would have a better chance of recovering... I've had this kind of situation before, losing an two NTFS partitions because of a blind cfdisk write, but thanks to that incantation I was able to get those back. Don't lose hope, though. I'll pray for your machine to spew out the magic numbers for your parts :D Just have a little care next time... -- ZAK B. ELEP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- <http://zakame.spunge.org> 1024D/FA53851D 1486 7957 454D E529 E4F1 F75E 5787 B1FD FA53 851D -- Running Debian GNU+Linux testing/unstable. GnuPG signed mail preferred.
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