[Sussex] Win98 eating a partition table

[Mark Barber]

I had a similar problem a month ago after getting a boot sector virus - 
problem with Knoppix is there isn't enough RAM for the partition table 
and the OS to work. I used Scandisk to recover the data but it was so 
fragmented I ended up reformatting the drive after I ran out of floppies.

Sorry if this is no help but it might at least close down one school of 
thought

Mark

Capt. Redbeard wrote:

> 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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