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Re: partition table woes

Kevin Lindsay (klindsay@mkintraweb.com)
Thu, 9 Sep 1999 11:57:29 -0700 (PDT)

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I found the info on rebuilding your partition tables. :) Here it is for
everyone to enjoy. :)

As far as I now know, there are four utilities that attempt to
assist in recovering a lost partition table, or a partition
that was deleted by mistake.

(i) findsuper is a small utility that finds blocks with the ext2
superblock signature, and prints out location and some info.
It is in the non-installed part of the e2progs distribution.

(ii) rescuept is a utility that recognizes ext2 superblocks,
FAT partitions, swap partitions, and extended partition tables;
it prints out information that can be used with fdisk or sfdisk
to reconstruct the partition table.
It is in the non-installed part of the util-linux distribution.

(iii) fixdisktable (http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/people/chaffee/fat32.html)
is a utility that handles ext2, FAT, NTFS, ufs, BSD disklabels
(but not yet old Linux swap partitions); it actually will rewrite
the partition table, if you give it permission.

(iv) gpart (http://home.pages.de/~michab/gpart/) is a utility
that handles ext2, FAT, Linux swap, HPFS, NTFS, FreeBSD and
Solaris/x86 disklabels, minix, reiser fs; it prints a proposed
contents for the primary partition table, and is well-documented.

On Wed, 8 Sep 1999, 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,

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