Alvin Oga wrote:
On Fri, 13 May 2005, Angelina Carlton wrote:Just for those of us just following along, can I use fdisk to record the EXACT information on my currently working systems to a file, andfdisk -l /dev/hda > /tmp/hda.fdisk.lstbe sure that file contained enough information to rebuild the partition table if ever needed?yupIs there a tool/command to do this?yupfdisk has quite a few options so I was courious about some preventative measures.save that info to a piece of paper, since your disk may not be accessible at the time - and tape the paper to the disk or the PC - your your palm top or your floppy or anyplace else other than files on the disk itselfc yaalvin
The only caveat I see with this method is it may only be convenient of even possible with primary partitions. If you have extended and logical partitions you may have to reconstruct a broken partition table chain, and that's a much more complex task. Then its not enough to just save enough info to fix the MBR. I don't even know anywhere you can find documentation on these unless you have some of the original IBM PC manuals, which are so hard to find that they are now probably collectors items. For this reason I avoid extended partitions altogether, but this is hard to do becomes some distributions (not sure about Debian) seem to insist in using extended partitions by default. As a result a lot of newbies get burned by this problem and no simple way to restore their partition tables. (I always set up my partitions manually, and never let any automated tool do this job.) You should be fine if you stick with primary partitions, otherwise in addition to the MBR data it probably would be wise to save copies of *each* primary and extended partition table and its offset from the beginning of the disk, and possibly even the logical partition tables as well to reconstruct the logical partition table chain, in addition to the MBR. <shiver> It's scary just thinking about it. On the other hand, I'm sure I've heard of various tools and disk editors that automate this process, but none are free that I know about.