Alvin Oga wrote:
On Fri, 13 May 2005, Angelina Carlton wrote:
Just for those of us just following along, can I use fdisk to record
the EXACT information on my currently working systems to a file, and
fdisk -l /dev/hda > /tmp/hda.fdisk.lst
be sure that file contained enough information to rebuild the
partition table if ever needed?
yup
Is there a tool/command to do this?
yup
fdisk has quite a few options so I was courious about some
preventative measures.
save that info to a piece of paper, since your disk may not be
accessible at the time
- and tape the paper to the disk or the PC
- your your palm top or your floppy or anyplace else
other than files on the disk itself
c ya
alvin
The only caveat I see with this method is it may only be convenient
of even possible with primary partitions. If you have extended and
logical partitions you may have to reconstruct a broken partition
table chain, and that's a much more complex task.
Then its not enough to just save enough info to fix the MBR. I don't
even know anywhere you can find documentation on these unless you have
some of the original IBM PC manuals, which are so hard to find that they
are now probably collectors items. For this reason I avoid extended
partitions altogether, but this is hard to do becomes some distributions
(not sure about Debian) seem to insist in using extended partitions
by default. As a result a lot of newbies get burned by this problem
and no simple way to restore their partition tables. (I always set up
my partitions manually, and never let any automated tool do this job.)
You should be fine if you stick with primary partitions, otherwise
in addition to the MBR data it probably would be wise to save copies
of *each* primary and extended partition table and its offset from the
beginning of the disk, and possibly even the logical partition tables
as well to reconstruct the logical partition table chain, in addition
to the MBR. It's scary just thinking about it.
On the other hand, I'm sure I've heard of various tools and disk editors
that automate this process, but none are free that I know about.
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