On Sunday 25 February 2007 14:05, JC D wrote:
Hi!
I think I have a serious problem with my partition table. I did all the
partitions with fdisk but may be not right, or somewhen screwed my
partition table up. I want to use a graphical tool like gparted also doing
some changes on my fat32 partition. But when I installed gparted I got an
empty partition table with nothing than
unallocated 55.89 GB (my disk is an 60 GB Hitachi)
nothing else!!!
Did you write/save the partition table after your changes? Did you reboot
thereafter? I make some suggestions below but they come with the health
warning attached that I have no responsibility if it doesn't work.
Here is my outpu from
# fdisk -l
fdisk -l
Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1191315361888+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
This is in itself is not a problem. If you create/resize partitions based on
MB you may or may not hit a clean cylinder boundary. Do your resizing in
cylinders and the end result will coincide with their boundaries.
/dev/hda21914420818427027+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda35100729617637480f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
Look what has happened here, your extended partition starts at cyl 5100, while
your first logical partition starts at cyl 4208. I'd say that neither are
correct. I suggest that you resize your extended partition hda3 to start at
cyl 4209, i.e. straight after the end of the previous primary partition
(hda2).
/dev/hda442085099 7164990 83 Linux
Here you need to change the beginning of this partition to be straight after
the end of the previous primary partition and at the beginning of the
extended partition. So, hda4 should start at cyl 4209.
/dev/hda5 *51005108 68008+ 83 Linux
This is good, but you do not need the boot flag. As a matter of fact it may
confuse your WinXP bootloader and Linux does not need it.
/dev/hda651085173 521608+ 82 Linux swap /
This is not good as it overlaps the end of the previous partition. hda6
should start at cyl 5109.
Solaris /dev/hda75173729617047768+ 83 Linux
Partition table entries are not in disk order
That's because they were created at a chronological sequence which do not
reflect their physical order on the disk. Not really important.
This seems wrong to me. Also parted says something with overlapping
partitions and its right I think. Is there any chance to repair this
without destroying the whole installation? I have backuped my installation
with rsync and also did save my mbr:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/backup/mbr512.img bs=512 count=1
and
dd if=/dev/hda of=/backup/mbr446.img bs=446 count=1
Since you have a backup the worst that can happen is to correct the partitions
as suggested above and discover that your OS cannot read them! In that case
reformat them and use your back up to restore the data.
An alternative approach is to restore your partition table to a previous
version and with it the previous boundaries of your partitions. After I was
faced with a borked partition table too, I used testdisk to recover and
restore previous partition table entries.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
HTH.
--
Regards,
Mick
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