Re: rescue a partition...ok, im freakin out a little

[Craig Genner <craig@gennerfam.freeserve.co.uk>]

On Thursday 01 May 2003 11:28 am, ajlewis2@intac.com wrote:
> In linux.debian.user, you wrote:
> > Ok, I was trying to format some of the unused disk space on my /dev/hdd
> > drive.  and it did not seem to work, so I got worried that I did
> > something wrong.  I then went back to my console and navigated to my
> > /mnt/hdd1 and it seemed fine.  So, I rebooted because I could not figure
> > out how to do it and was going to head into my windows partition and
> > just format it there.  but I noticed that it told me that I had 70
> > something unused mb, thats not good, I should have had a vfat parition
> > on there.  So I booted back to linux and found that I in fact screwed
> > something up dearly.  Now, knowing that there was no massive disk write
> > I am sure that this can be fixed, or at least I sure hope, but I am
> > extremely nervous because I have no idea how to fix it.  Thanks, and I
> > reallllly look forward to your replies
> >
> > Thank You,
> > Jason Self
>
> All you have to do is go in and rewrite the partition table.  That will be
> very easy if you have a copy of it written out somewhere.  I have a copy on
> an index card from a printout using linux fdisk.
>
> If you don't have that, you can reconstruct it using either gpart or
> rescuept.  I think another possibility is Ranish Partition Manager.  URL's
> I have are:
>
> www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/7620/gpart
> www.doclib.org/Linux/system/misc/util-linux-2.9r/util-linux-2.9r/rescuept/
> www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part
>
> A look in www.google.com/linux for these should turn them up if these links
> are old or wrong.
>
> Anita

I did some thing similar last week, I was sure the prtition still existed and 
that the data was fine, it was just marked as empty and Grub wouldn't boot 
it.  Using fdisk (linux not windows version) I changed the partition type to 
NTFS and then rebooted.  I was able to boot and all my files were still 
there.
I suggest you try the same and if that fails follow the exclent advice above.

Craig