[Sussex] Win98 eating a partition table

[Stephen Williams]

I'd be thinking about booting from a Knoppix CD-ROM. 3.7 is the latest
and there's lots of useful tools on there as well. I wouldn't try
booting from hard disk again (as already recommended) until you've
diagnosed the problem.

I think I'd try running fdisk -l /dev/hda as a start, and see if fdisk
can see your partitions. If not, I'd look for some of the recovery
tools.

If you're really stumped then you might find further interesting reading
here:

www.partitionrecovery.com

Steve Williams.




On Sun, 2005-03-27 at 19:03 +0100, Rupert Swarbrick wrote:
> >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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