on Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 12:26:35AM -0400, dman (dsh8290@rit.edu) wrote: > > I screwed up my partition table today and, like an idiot, I don't have > a record of it. Are there any tools I can use to determine where my > partitions were? No specific tools I'm aware of. I keep a hardcopy printout of my partition tables and mount schemes, backed up by my paritioning HOWTO (doing double-duty as another backup of my partition tables). > I have a 10GB IDE disk, hda. I had hda1 as /, hda2 as swap and hda3 > as /home. The space was approximately evenly divided between / and > /home and 256MB swap. Obviously / starts at sector 1. I determined, > through trial-and-error, that / ends not before sector 748, but fsck > doesn't complain if I make the partition too big. I don't think I > have the size quite right because when I add 256MB to that and > allocate /home I get errors about an invalid superblock. I can run > debugfs on / and see all the data in that superblock. There must be > some way (even looking at the raw bits on the disk) to determine where > the partitions started prior to my screw up. It is (was) a woody > system and I have potato CDs (ie rescue disk). I think the following may work. I've managed to recover a partition table from memory before. If you know how you sized your partitions, you can try plugging in the appropriate values, and saving the table. Since the partition table doesn't actually modify disk data, this won't scramble your data. I'd restrict my mounts to read-only -- if you size things right, your filesystems should match up, if you don't, they should break. That's the theory. It's a bit seat-of-your-pants, and it's a last-ditch suggestion, and it's crazy, but it might just work.... > Thanks for any pointers and suggestions. ...print your partition tables next time and shoot a copy of the file to your website. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org Are these opinions my employer's? Hah! I don't believe them myself!
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