On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 20:54 +0000, techlists@comcast.net wrote:
Unfortunately, I do *not* remember the original partition settings.
In that case, I suggest that you immediately get a full disk image saved somewhere safe so that you can play with it at your convenience. In the *IX world, "dd" will do a raw copy for you. There are also some Win*- based ones (row-something-or-another). Copies to another large HD or to CD (can be ISO format, but *IX can also write as ext*, tar, cpio onto the media).
I was hoping to find a live CD that could fix such disasters (i.e. systemrescueCD, or some such thing). I did find a Windows based program that's supposed to do the trick. The evaluation edition lets you see if it can see your lost data; you have to buy it ($79) to actually be able to recover the data. This was at:
http://www.stellarinfo.com/linux-data-recovery.htm
I'm sure there must be an open source trick somewhere that should work though.
That's probably true. I'm sure that a Guru or two has had to recover and decided that it was with a program. Start googling for that.
Another possibility: google for the MBR layout. If your loss was just the flag (IIRC, x'05') indicating a valid partition got stomped, you might have an easy out yet. Lots can be done with "dd" and a few good utils. Even if the flag is lost, you might find partition information in those first (two) blocks on trk0, cyl0.
Paul
<snip>
HTH and, need I say it, I wish you lots of luck and good backups in the future.