Re: Hard Disk Partition Recovery
On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 12:58:31AM +0530, Jeetu Golani wrote:
> Hello guys,
>
> Someone I know recently got his partition table destroyed by misusing Norton's
> Rescue. Anyways, I was able to recreate his partition table using gpart and
> Fdisk and Debian's installable CD. The partitions are Win95 Fat32 (LBA)
> partitions. I've setup the Id's on the partitions to reflect these as Win95
> Fat32 (LBA) partitions (extended where necessary)
>
> I can mount and access the data under Linux. I've even copied the data onto a
> backup hard disk. Now the mysterious thing is that I can't see these
> partitions under DOS :(
>
> I've used an MSDOS 6.22 disk to boot into the system since the boot loaders
> not running after fdisk wrote to the MBR and it can't see any of the
> partitions and pops up the message "Invalid drive specification". FDisk shows
> one of the partitions as Non-Dos and the partition sizes are in negatives.
>
> I can't figure out that how I can see everything fine under Linux but not
> under DOS.....how do I get things working correctly?? Any ideas would be
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks
Basically you will have to use a Microsoft version of fdisk to create
a partition table capable of being understood by Microsoft OSes.
Briefly, Linux's CHS-LBA translation takes over from the BIOS's sooner
than Windoze's does, and is more intelligent to boot.
When you use Microsoft fdisk, it wipes out the boot sector on each
partition you create. If you save the boot sectors beforehand, and
restore them after, you might be lucky enough to get the partitions
back.
However, given that you have managed to back up the data, the easiest
method is simply to repartition and reformat the dud HD using
Microsoft tools, and then copy all the data back. You'll have to use
Linux or Windoze Exploder to copy it back; DOS XCOPY misses out too
many files, and loses the long filenames.
If there are any Linux partitions on the dud HD, create the MS
partitions first with MS tools, and leave the Linux partition table
entries blank; then boot Linux and use Linux tools to create the Linux
partitions.
It's not entirely clear from the above which OS's version of fdisk
you've been using for which operation, but I don't think it affects my
conclusions much.
Never ever let Norton Disk Doctor repair your partition table. It's
more like Norton Doctor Death. If it sort of worked before, it's
guaranteed to be completely and utterly trashed after.
Pigeon
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