VanLUG Email Archive
Jeff Bryer (bryer@sfu.ca)
Thu, 9 Sep 1999 09:05:44 -0700 (PDT)
I just went through a recovered a linux machine here on campus
yesterday from someone who had blown away there partition table.
(Basically they were using XCD-Roast and wrote to /dev/sda2, then
/dev/sda5 and /dev/sda6 (ext part, /home and /usr respectively).
We used a program called gpart
http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/
Little tricky to get it to work. From memory this is what we did
(of course the steps on your system may vary).
1) compile the program on another linux machine
2) transfer it to floppy, we still had / on the messed up computer so
could still boot from the hard drive somewhat
3) run gpart ('gpart /dev/sda' in our case)
4) look at the guessed partition table, wasn't really right but /dev/sda5
was basically right and as that was /home that was all we cared about
5) messed around for a long time trying to figure out how to write the
partition table, turned out we had to do this 'gpart -i -W /dev/sda /dev/sda',
never worked until we did it in interactive mode
6) reboot, check fdisk, before we had /dev/sda1 (primary /), /dev/sda2 (ext),
/dev/sda5 (/home), /dev/sda6 (/usr), /dev/sda7 (swap) ; now we had
/dev/sda1 (primary /), /dev/sda2 (primary /home), /dev/sda3 (primary /usr),
/dev/sda4 (primary swap)
7) mount the partitions (didn't bother to fsck them, and wasn't required for
us)
8) 'init 3' (up to this point we were in single user)
9) ftp the data off and reinstall the OS (actually I think they are still
at this stage, but that's where I left them alone)
Hope this helps
-- Jeff Bryer bryer@sfu.ca Systems Administrator (604) 291-4935 Academic Computing, Simon Fraser University
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