[Gllug] Partition Table Problem

[French, Alastair]

Hi all

I hope someone can help, I have a semi dead disk and no recent back up!

The machine is a dual boot (2000 & SuSE 8.1). I was using 2000 and Explorer
crashed, a few minutes later there were read errors from the "D" drive. I
rebooted and got a failure on NT LOADER. A few more reboots and the BIOS was
reporting a failed Primary Disk.

I took the disk a put it as a slave on the secondary channel in a working
SuSE 8.1 machine. A bit of fdisking later and the partition table was
corrupt. Fdisk suggested that a write would fix most of it and sure enough I
can now read the partition table. 

The disk from what I remember had the following

1	Win2000 Boot	NTFS
2	Extended 
3	Swap			
4	Linux			Ext2
5	Windows Data	Either NTFS or FAT32

I can read 1 & 4, mount reports that 3 is swap and won't mount it, 2 is
reported as possible extended and won't mount. 5 reports that the superblock
is bad and the partition is too big.

I seem to remember that superblocks are repeated, how do I tell where the
copy of the superblock is so I can point e2fsck at it?

Is it safe to just recreate the logical partition (5) to fill the extended
(2) and hope! All the data that I need is of course in the area that I can;t
access. 

If it would be of any help I have the dump from fdisk showing the start and
finish of each partition.

Thanks

Alastair

PS any recommendations for a new disk and DVD burner!



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