Some more details about the state of the partition table: the normal fdisk "p" command shows correct sizes for partitions hda2 (193-2193) and hda8 (845-1106), but the "expert mode" fdisk "p" command shows truncated hda2 (193-1023) and hda8 (845-1023). In both fdisk modes partitions 9 and 10 are not shown. I am not sure that deleting and re-creating my partitions will help since the partition sizes already appear to be correct in the normal fdisk mode, it looks more like if there is an externally imposed hard limit of 1023 cylinders which prevents access to partitions 9 and 10. I expect that if I re-run _dos_ fdisk and allow support for large drives (without actually creating/deleting any partitions) the problem will disappear, but I dont't have much experience with dos fdisk (as the mess in which I find myself now demonstrates), and it does not really explain what it's doing or ask for confirmation, so I'd prefere to be sure before doing this. Isn't there a way to "activate support for large disks" for an existing partition table from linux? Thank you in advance, Teddy On Sun, 16 Jan 2000, cll wrote:
Provided you haven't actually *written* anything to the new partitions, or formatted them, you should be able to get your old ones back. Just recreate them *exactly* as they were (cylinder ID's sizes etc). Otherwise, it is restore from backup time -- :)
cll
Theodore Todorov wrote:
Hello,
I have damaged the partition table of my hard disk in the following way: I attempted to move an unused linux partition to windows type doing this:
1) in linux fdisk I deleted my partition 7 which used cylinders 583-844 and commented the corresponding line in /etc/fstab (I was hoping for a clean reboot after the changes -- how naive!) 2) in dos fdisk (win 98 dos window) I created a dos partition using the free space thus created, since the (linux) fdisk man page suggested it's best to create partitions with the native tool of their type.
Of course I had to reboot windows after that, but luckily I was distracted from my computer during the lilo prompt and the system booted in linux. That's when I saw the disaster: my swap and home partitions were gone! I was left in a safe mode (root partition mounted readonly) to contemplate my damaged partition table. After some time I realized that the last cylinder of my /dev/hda2 (extended partition where all linux partitions live) has changed from 2193 to 1023. I guess this has happened because I answered "NO" to the question of dos fdisk "do you want large disk support?". I was impressed by the warning that if I include this support "other operating systems" may have problems with the partitions.
To complete the picture, I should say that /dev/hda8, which occupied cylinders 845-1106 does not appear to be corrupted (I can mount it). The newly created dos partition 7 is one cylinder smaller than the linux partition that it replaced (cylinders 583-843 instead of 844). My swap was in partition 9 and my /home in partition 10, and they are gone (fdisk shown nothing about them) I have not formatted the dos partition yet, and haven't written anything to the disk.
Is there a way to fix the partition table and get my /home (and swap) back? linux fdisk reports the correct number of cylinders for my disk (2193), but it says I have plenty of unallocated space. It looks like if I could change the last cylinder of partition 2 to 2193 "in place" everything should become normal, but I know nothing about repairing partition tables! I am running SuSe linux 6.3, but since my problem is not very distribution-specific, I only mention this for completeness.
Please help me!
Teddy (t.todorov@cern.ch)
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