Re: Disk Corruption (was: Disk formatting)

["Jonathan Brandmeyer" <jbrandmeyer@earthlink.net>]

> 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.
>

I can definitely boot into the system with an emergency disk.
I should point out that my emergency disk is the stock 2.2.20 vanilla
kernel, while the current system kernel is 2.4.18-686, also stock.  All of
the partions are ext2 or swap on hdb (since hdb5 was never formatted).  This
kernel does not have support for my video driver, so I am in console-only
mode.

dmesg shows this interesting entry:
Partition check:
  hda: hda1
  hdb: hdb1 hdb2 hdb3 hdb4 <hdb5>

and the view in cfdisk is:
Size: 60040544256 bytes
  hdb1    Boot    Primary    Linux ext2    509.97
  hdb2                Primary    Linux swap    1019.94
  hdb3                Primary    Linux ext2    30721.43
  hdb5                Logical    Linux            1998.75
                          Logical    Free Space    25786.26

What if hdb4 is actually a primary partition that I cannot see?  This would
violate the partitioning rules, wouldn't it?

Thanks for any help,
Jonathan