Re: HELP! partition table messed up -- (DOS okay but linux is not!)

["Arup Mukherjee" <arup+@cmu.edu>]

Ralph Winslow writes:
 > Arup Mukherjee wrote:
 > > 
 > > Hi,
 > >         I'm having a problem that appears to be the inverse of what
 > > some people here have had before. The partition tables on BOTH my
 > > disks, as linux sees them, are screwed up. However, if you boot dos or
 > > windows 95 from the hard disks (via lilo, which still works), both dos
 > > and w95 still have an accurate idea of the partition information and
 > > work fine. I guess they're using a copy of the partition table as
 > > opposed to the real thing.
 > > 
 > >         So: Is there some way I can get DOS to write its idea of the
 > > partition info back out to the main partition table? (in the boot sector?)
 > 
 > Can't help here, I know little of DOS and less about W95.  But I doubt
 > that any of these trashed views of the system would prove helpful.

No.... what I was trying to say is that from DOS and W95, the
partition tables do NOT appear trashed. They're fine -- fdisk sees all
the partitions, with the right sizes -- as long as you boot off
dos/w95 that's installed on the hard disk. 

I'm under the impression (from the debian fdisk man page, among other
things) that DOS/W95 store a copy of the partition table in their boot
sectors, and use its info in preference to that from the MBR. Assuming
that's true, I'd just like to make the MBR consistent with what DOS
and W95 already believe is the reality. 

 > If you wrote down the partitioning information that you used to
 > partition when you used linux fdisk in the first place, you could now
 > use that to re-do what your linux fdisk partitioning and, perhaps,
 > restore order. I believe that this is your only prayer, but hopefully,
 > there are others on the list with more experience that can help.

No such luck. :-( The info I get from DOS fdisk shows me the right
partition sizes, so I can probably figure it out to within a few
cylinders or so of the real thing. That will require a lot of mucking
around though (since I presumably won't get it on the first shot), so
I'm only going to try it as a last resort.

Thanks for the input though. I'm really hoping there's someone out
there with a utility or something that does what I need. 

Many thanks, 

-Arup Mukherjee