Re: Help! FAT magic number corrupted!

[me <slandrum@cs.smith.edu>]

On Fri, 16 Oct 1998, Stephen J. Carpenter wrote:

> <MORAL> NEVER play with the partitions on a system without making a
> backup! </MORAL>

yep, i know. <sigh>

> Have you tried looking at it in normal fdisk?

fdisk /dev/hda will show me the partition table clearly. no probs there.
if i try to write & exit, it gives me something like:

--
The partition table has been altered!
calling ioctl() to re-read partition table
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 <hda5 hda6>
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 <hda5 hda6>
syncing disks
--

and exits. fdisk /dev/hda1 won't give me a partition table because it's a
dos disk. 

> try cd'ing to the directory where /dev/hda3 is mounted and
> chroot . bash 
> 
> this SHOULD give you a shell that can run those binaries. 
> (and its bash too ;))

thanks, yes, this works, and i can run cfdisk fine. cfdisk works fine. I
didn't change anything, but i tried to write the partition table, and
here's the error cfdisk gives:

"Wrote partition table, but re-read table failed. Reboot to update table."

This was what it gave me originally when this whole mess started. 

> have you tried fsck?

e2fsck on my ext2 drives (/dev/hda3 et al) works fine. e2fsck on /dev/hda1
of course doesn't work, because it's a non-ext2 partition. e2fsck on
/dev/hda returns "Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks...
e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/hda."
<what's this superblock thing? I'm not up on the technical details of
FATs.>

fsck.msdos on /dev/hda returns:
Currently, only 2 FATs are supported, not 243.

fsck.msdos on /dev/hda1 returns:
Currently, only 2 FATs are supported, not 81.

Hmm. Why does it think I have 81 FATs on one partition?

> As for the Win95 system... 
> you will probablky need to re-install

yep, i figured so. but right now I can't even get a Win95 boot floppy to
recognize my C drive (aka /dev/hda1). <sigh>
Could fips help me with that problem?

Thanks so much. I feel kinda stupid for not having taken appropriate
precautions, but i guess i'm learning the hard way... <sigh>

-Renee Landrum
slandrum@cs.smith.edu (main)     ----- southern_grrl@iname.com (forwarding)