Re: Disk Corruption (was: Disk formatting)

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

Jonathan Brandmeyer said:
> Something VERY BAD has happened.  When I attempted to format the disk,
> with mkfs.ext3, it reported that the partition table for that partition
> said 0 size, and I should reboot the computer to re-read the partion
> table.  When I rebooted, instead of LILO, I saw an endless stream of "01 "
> repeating without end!  I can boot into BIOS, and probably an emergency
> disk, but that is all.

sounds like a reinstall may be in order.

if you re partitioned an active disk(that has filesystems mounted)
almost always you must reboot for the changes to take effect, cfdisk
and fdisk both report this(haven't tried other tools).

either that or perhaps you tried to format /dev/hdb instead of
/dev/hdb5.

perhaps you can try booting from a rescue disk, and check the
partition table and filesystems.

but it sounds like the data may be gone. it may be recoverable but
chances are you probably don't want to spend the days/week trying
to recover it.

nate