James Pearson wrote: >> Is there a safe way of recovering the partition table? >> I have a vague idea that copies are kept at various places on the disk? > > AFAIK, there is only one copy at the start of the disk - however what > does /proc/partitions contain? > > This may well have the details of the partitions and sizes when the > machine was booted - it this is the case, take a copy of this info - > which you can then use to manually re-create the partition table using > fdisk Thanks very much for that; /proc/partitions does indeed seem to contain correct information, so all will not be lost if there is a power outage tomorrow: ------------------------------------ [tim at helen ~]$ cat /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name 8 0 78125000 sda 8 1 30716248 sda1 8 2 104422 sda2 8 3 3911827 sda3 8 4 1 sda4 8 5 29302528 sda5 8 6 14088973 sda6 8 16 1465138584 sdb 8 17 61440561 sdb1 8 18 9775552 sdb2 8 19 9775552 sdb3 8 20 1 sdb4 8 21 97667136 sdb5 8 22 97667136 sdb6 8 23 244147806 sdb7 8 24 146488671 sdb8 8 25 97667136 sdb9 8 26 97667136 sdb10 8 27 97667136 sdb11 ------------------------------------