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Re: partition table woes

Derek \ (dkranefe@direct.ca)
Thu, 09 Sep 1999 09:51:24 -0700

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Hello Sean and Vanlug,

Yes it sounds like a partition table got overwritten and as Brian has
mentioned SuSE has a utility that tries to repair damaged partitions.
From the man page for gpart:

DESCRIPTION
       gpart tries to guess which partitions are on a hard disk.
       If the primary partition table has been lost, overwritten
       or destroyed the partitions still exist on the disk but
       the operating system cannot access them.

       gpart ignores the primary partition table and scans the
       disk (or disk image, file) sector after sector for several
       filesystem/partition types. It does so by "asking"
       filesystem recognition modules if they think a given
       sequence of sectors resembles the beginning of a filesys­
       tem or partition type. Currently the following filesystem
       types are known to gpart (listed by module names) :

<snip... Linux is listed :) >

AUTHOR
       Please send bug reports, suggestions, comments etc. to

              Michail Brzitwa <mb@ichabod.han.de>

But all is not lost either, I also damaged my /usr partition once by
changing around a swap partition at the time and while updating the
fstab I accidently did a mkswap to /usr. Now the partitions were also at
the time deleted and rearranged before I did the mkswap so only /usr got
hit. But with fdisk and knowing the start and sizes of the partitions I
was able to recreate the partition table and reclaim all lost data
except for /usr which was restored via a nfs transfer from my primary
system. I could do that because the two systems are running identical
distributions with the same options installed so I didn't get any
library or package conflicts.

If you cannot find gpart or do not use SuSE I could email you the gpart
package if you want to try it out.

Take er easy, stay cool!

Derek

Sean Ellis wrote:
>
> Ahoy,
>
> A terrible thing has happened. Playing footloose and fancy free with dd
> I've overwritten the first 512 bytes on /dev/hdb, which is now
> inaccessible.
>
> If anyone can point me toward a remedy for this I'd appreciate it,
> although I'm beginning to think that the whole drive will require
> rebuilding from scratch,
>
> gracias,
> Sean

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