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<DIV><FONT size=2>Hi,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Not that such a thing would ever happen to me of course but,
just as a what-if question, how do you recover lost data on a hard-drive in the
following situation?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Let's say an amatuer Linux dabbler, let's call him Bob,
has a 20GB, dual-boot hard-drive partitioned in the following manner: a
20MB /boot partition, two Win98 partitions totalling 3GB, and an extended
partition for the rest of the drive itself subdivided into about seven logical
drives with the /, /home, /usr, etc. partitions. Now, let's say that
(suprise, suprise) Windows is acting up and complaining about something
so Bob decides to re-install it from scratch but first he wants to
combine the two Windows partitions into one (leaving the Linux ones untouched)
but as DOS FDisk doesn't acknowledge the existence of non-DOS partitions he
decides to use Linux FDisk for the re-partitioning. However, when Bob
alters the partition table, making just one Windows partition (hope you're still
following this), he forgets (oops!) to change the partition type to
FAT32. Now when he goes to install Windows, it looks at Bobs'
hard-drive and thinks "Oh, these ten Linux partitions I see here cannot actually
exist, therefore they don't actually exist, therefore this is a clean
hard-drive, therefore I will re-set the partition table and take the whole 20GB
for myself, HAAHAHAHAHAHA". Meanwhile poor, innocent and rather
naive Bob sees a dialog box saying something on the order of
"Your computer is not ready..." and thinks "Oh, I'm getting an error
message because I haven't formatted the Windows partition, therefore if I
press OK it will format the partition for me", and innocently presses the OK
button (NNNOOOOooooooo). Two seconds later, the installer reports being
happy at which point Bob, though initially confused at how the formatting can be
so fast, realises what he has done and proceeds to bash his head repeatedly
against the wall. Luckily, he knows that the data had not been
formatted and so, ***in theory***, is still on the hard-drive and he remembers
the exact sectors of the /boot, Windows and extended partitions so is able to
restore at least part of the original table but the sub-partioning of the
extended partition is unfortunately not recorded or remembered. The
problem therefore is what does Bob do in this case to get his non-critical
but beloved data back? Are there any tools to read data on a un-partioned
hard-drive or un-partioned section of one or is there some way to recover the
lost data? And by the way the person who said to re-install the data from
the back-ups is not helping matters at all.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Thank you, thank you, thank you,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Captain Redbeard.</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>