Re: Help -- Data recovery

[Martin Bishop <martinbishop@crosswinds.net>]

Oswald Buddenhagen [ob6@inf.tu-dresden.de] wrote:
> hmm ... how did you use dos fdisk at any time? if so, then you _might_
> have a problem. but i guess, you used only cfdisk for the whole
> repartitioning.

After booting into Win98 and couldn't see hda2, I ran 'dos fdisk' to 
check the partition to see what info I can gather. I noticed that the
Volume Label is empty (used to be siloA), and the filesystem is UNKNOWN
(so that's why Win98 cannot see any data on that partition).

So to answer your question, yes I did run 'dos fdisk' but I did not 
modify/change anything when I quit.

> was this partition for sure hda2 or was it hda5? if it
> was hda5, then you have to make it a logical (=extended) partition again.
> does the partition now start at the same position, as it started before
> you deleted it? if you created it originally with dos fdisk, then it might
> have been be strangely allocated. then you would have to find the boot
> sector of the partition ... i think, disk editior from the norton
> utilities offers this "partition search" feature.

Hmmm, now that you've brought this point up, I can't remember if I
used 'dos fdisk' or 'linux (c)fdisk' to create the partition on hda.

Ok so far, I've only recreated a primary partition and that doesn't
seem to work. I guess I'll try setting it as a logical partition and
see if it restores things back to normal.

A quick question. If the partition was originally a primary partition,
and now I'm setting as a logical partition, would it screw up the data
beyond repair?

As you can see, all I care about now is to get the data out of that
partition, and I'm a little nervous about trying things that could
further corrupt the data on it.

> _possibly_ the partition has had another size, then you specified now (dos
> fdisk likes to leave some space unused without an obvious reason). but my
> experinence was, that windows does not care about size mismatches ...

If I understand you correctly, the size that I specify is the block
ending from hda1 all the way to the max size of the disk. This is
because I only have two partition on this drive, and I haven't deleted
or changed hda1.

> > "man cfdisk" has a suggestion/warning for DOS 6.X mentioning something about
> > zeroing the first 512 bytes of the partition with this command:
> > 	
> > 	"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1  bs=512  count=1"
> >  
> > I'm afraid that if I try the above I might stuff up the partition table further,
> > so I haven't ran it.
> > 
> do not even _think_ of running that command ... it's exactly the opposite
> of what you want: it would tell windoze, that the partition is empty.

:) Ok I won't run this command then.

MB.