Emerald wrote:
Hmm, not sure about this one, kind of in doubt here, but I know that 'fdisk /mbr' writes a new master boot record to the HD and I think it also checks the disk for the partitions and writes a new partition table with what it finds. Guess it would really hurt to try though, but remember that if you installed LILO in the MBR, it'll be gone after this.
If I'm wrong about the partition table, please tell me...
Well, I'm telling you ;-) fdisk /mbr will *not* rebuild your partition table, it only zeros the MBR. In this case, I don't think I'd use fdisk /mbr at all.
P.S.: If you have partition magic, you can run a check on your HD and it'll tell you if there's something wrong with your partition table or anything else, but you can also use the SuSE cd's for this (just go through the installation untill it asks where you want to install, there'll be an output of fdisk)
Jason wrote:
I believe a Win virus did some serious damage to my drive. I used to have around 10 logical linux partitions, now they're all gone (after using Win98).
The primary partition (/dev/hda1) is still there. The extended partition is still there (no logicals now).
What I don't have is a rescue disk.
Well, what you can do is boot of the CD and select 'Start Rescue System' or something similar. This will let you boot of your harddrive (assuming / is the partititon that survived, hda1). You just need to get access to fdisk somehow.
What I do have are the start and end cylinder values for each partition, the size of them, the device they're associated with, their mount points, and inode densities.
This is excellent news!! I doubt that a Windows virus could do anything to the data on your Linux partitions, unless it really tried, so it's probably just the partition table that is nackered. Since you have the start and end cylinder values for your partitions (that was very wise of you to note them down ;->> ) you should be able to just start up fdisk ('fdisk /dev/hda') and recreate your partitions with the *exact* same cylinder values. But then again, it sounds like you've done this before...
The data is still there (I feel) - but the partition table is corrupt.
I would definitely agree here. I'd say this situation is 90% recoverable, mainly due to the fact that you've got those cylinder boundaries noted down...
Any way of fixing it?? (I remeber on a previous occasion, I tried using fdisk to recreate the partitions, using the start and end cylinder values I had - and it partially worked.. should I try this again??)
Yes, but be carefull and make sure you get it right! Good luck! And remember - any problems, you know who to call... Chris -- __ _ -o)/ / (_)__ __ ____ __ Chris Reeves /\\ /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / ICQ# 22219005 _\_v __/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/