[Sussex] Win98 eating a partition table

[Rupert Swarbrick]

>If you don't know the geometry, then the chances of recovery become much
>harder. There are methods of recovery, costly methods of recovery...
>
>There are specialists who will recover drives that have been formatted,
>even dropped, and the police can recover data by painstakingly stripping
>the magnetic material layer by layer from a hard drive, but that would be
>prohibitively expensive.
>
>
Whoah! You needn't go that far!

A friend (Win only) hosed his computer a couple of months ago eating the
partition table for one of his NTFS partitions. We soon found a free
linux NTFS recoverer and, booting off a rescue disk, proceeded to
demangle the partition table again.

If they exist for NTFS, there must be ext2 etc. tools available.

I've just done a 10 second google search for 'ext2 partition recover'
and seen gpart (http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/), but
there's probably much more around.

Fear not! Your data's not lost (yet)*,**

Rupert


* Unless you're like my other friend who used a BIOS feature to encrypt
the entire hard disk. That, I believe was more of a problem :-)

** And whatever you do, only boot from boot floppies and so on until
you've fixed the partitions otherwise you risk writing stuff on top of
them with Windows, which doesn't know that your tax records are on
sector 35486.
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