[Sussex] Win98 eating a partition table

[Capt. Redbeard]

Hi,

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?

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.


Thank you, thank you, thank you,

Captain Redbeard.
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