Corrupted partition table/drive
I have a machine with three fixed disks:
hda = Windows XP (40 gb)
hdb = (see below) (60 gb)
hdc = ext2 partition for data storage (30 gb)
hdb is the disk I'm having serious problems with. Before, the disk had several partitions on it. I am not sure how many primary or secondary partitions there were, although all of them were Linux partitions.
My goal was to erase the first three partitions (because I never used them anymore) and combine them into one large ext2 partition for more data storage. (There were a total of five or six between the primary/extended.) Using the Ultimate Boot CD and XFDISK, I deleted the first three partitions, rebooted, and attempted to use the same utility to create one large ext2 partition. However, after it created the partition, XFDISK reported an error writing the partition data.
The result is that none of the hdb partitions are accessible. I cannot boot from any hdb partition and the partition utilities
I've tried have not been able to ?see? the hdb partitions. One partial exception is R-Linux, which I ran from a bootable CD. While it cannot read all of the partition data, it did see a partial file structure for the partitions while performing a scan of the drive, even though it was sketchy and the filesizes were not accurate.
I also attempted to use a gparted live CD, and it could not even see hdb (it does see the other two just fine). Using gpart on the command line returns:
'*** Fatal error: cannot get sector size on dev(/dev/hdb).'
When I open a terminal and type in 'gpart -C 29437,16,255 /dev/hdb' to try forcing it to recognize the drive configuration, it gives the same error.
The BIOS reports that the drive is there. It detects it automatically.
I've been trying to figure this out for awhile. So far, no real success with anything. Any suggestions are appreciated.
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