Subject: is my partition table hopelessly ruined? To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 20:39:33 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] Content-Type: text Message-Id: From: Michael Jones Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com If anyone knows of a better place to ask these questions, with relatively quick, appropriate replies, let me know. I ask here just because I've been subscribed for a couple of years, and I know there are some very knowledgable people here. (And because I think DR-Dos's fdisk is to blame; but I could be wrong.) So... Things are now looking even worse than I had feared. I was finally able to get the fdisk option to write a standard dr-dos master boot record. I did so, and all seemed to be going "fine." It was now booting from my hard drive, albeit from the *new* bootable partition, and still not recognizing two of my dos drives. But that was progress, right? Then I was able to get into Linux via the RH CD Rom (god, that installation program is smart; I didn't even have to reinstall a single byte...it let me create a boot disk, and put me right in). Here's where the strangeness soaked in. Cfdisk reported a fatal error--corrupt partition. So then I rewrote the "original" MBR from dos's fdisk--which put it back into the "no message, just hang" state, but still let me get into Linux from my new wonderful more-beautiful-than-a-redhead boot disk. I tried cfdisk again. Same problem. So I tried Linux's fdisk. And here is what it reports. NOTICE that it doesn't report anything for /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, /dev/hda6, or /dev/hda7 (the latter two are understandable considering the contents of /dev/hda5--the first two are only understandable when you look at my previous message and recall that Dos's fdisk has refused to acknowledge their existence since before this mess started): Disk /dev/hda: 128 heads, 63 sectors, 523 cylinders Units = cylinders of 8064 * 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda3 * 1 166 669280+ 6 DOS 16-bit >=32M Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?): phys=(133, 1, 1) logical=(0, 1, 1) Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings: phys=(298, 127, 63) logical=(165, 127, 63) /dev/hda4 167 178 48384 5 Extended Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?): phys=(299, 0, 1) logical=(166, 0, 1) Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings: phys=(310, 127, 63) logical=(177, 127, 63) /dev/hda5 ? 349621 412506253551826+ 49 Unknown It seems that the logical reportings might be correct (only the first number differs in each case, and the logical numbers are ordered). Unfortunately, there are only three "valid" partition entries with which to work, so even if the logical numbers are correct they won't restore my partition. Correct? Fdisk did report that the errors (or some errors?) would be corrected with the 'w'rite option. But I've learned not to trust software. :) Is there any way to recover my partition table? Is there any software--however expensive, at this point :)--that could reconstruct a brand new partition table, without the loss of data? Actually, it would seem easy enough to edit the disk directly, and recover the starting points of the FAT tables on my dos drives, and thus recover the data on those drives. It's been a while since I've looking at NTFS, so I don't know if anything similar could be said for those. Unfortunately, I don't have the original starting and ending positions written down; all I have are the order of the positions, and the approximated size as reported to two decimal places by Linux Cfdisk. If I did have this information, would recreating the partition table work? Could it still work now, knowing just the sizes (and the fact that /dev/hda3 and /dev/hda4 *apparently* are OKAY, at least according to Dr-Dos, which lets me read and write data, without any noticeable problems). Is it possible that all of this is caused by just ONE original byte being wrong? Is it possible that just editing the partition table directly, andmaking one or two changes, will make everything all right? Sigh. And I always laughed at people for not backing up their stuff. If I lose my primary hard drive, well, I'll have lost most of my reason for living. Or something. -- Michael Jones