Emergency - partition table gone
Ok I totally screwed over my hard drive yesterday and need help.
My partition table was overwritten with a wrong one. Heres how it happened:
I wanted to put debian on another computer of mine for a server. This computer
has neither a cdrom or a floppy so I decided the easiest way to install debian
on it was to put the hard drive in my main system. So I plugged it in on the
same channel as my main drive.
Now the bios didn't recognize my main drive anymore but I figured it was
probably because they were both set as master and didn't think more about it.
The other drive was recognized fine. So I booted from cd, formatted and
checked the other drive (it showed up just fine, 270MB hda1). Then installed
debian on it. When I was satisfied that it was running and booting I put it
back into my other computer. When I tried to boot my main computer from my
tried and tested boot floppy and it kernel panicked with some error about not
being able to mount the root. Same scenario with rescue root=/dev/hdaX from
the cdrom. So I started up fdisk and saw that it showed there being a 270MB
linux partition on my main drive and 40GB of free space! AAHHHH!
So first of all. How the hell did the partition table from the other hard
drive get on my main one?? My main one, although it was still plugged in, was
not recognized by the bios or the debian installer when I was installing on the
other drive. First I thought well if the partition table from the other drive
is there then maybe even my new debian installation is there. However it
doesn't seem to be because rescue root=/dev/hda1 fails with the same mount
error.
So apparently I overwrote the partition table (who knows how) but the original
data is still there. Is there any way I can restore the original system
table? Scan the hard drive for partitions and reconstruct it??? There's
notthing really irreplaceable on there but I cant say how many hundreds of
hours of work I've done in getting it the way it was. Any hope at all? Any
linux programs that I can use to reconstruct the partition table? Any windows
programs?
Desperate and still under shock,
Leo
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