On 04/27/2011 07:26 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 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:
It most certainly _will_ be lost. The "files" you see in /proc are just
windows into various kernel data structures. The /proc file system does
not exist anywhere on disk.
Make a paper copy of those numbers, and don't lose it. You will need to
be very careful to re-create the partitions exactly as they were or risk
losing data. Each logical partition within the extended partition begins
with a secondary partition table, and if those get written in the wrong
places they could overwrite something important. When you create the
partitions with fdisk, you will have to play around with numbers until
you get a listing with block counts that exactly match those numbers
(except for the size of sdb4, the extended partition, which the kernel
always reports as "1"). Only then can you safely write out the new table.
It would make life so much easier if fdisk would simply accept those same
numbers as Kilobytes, but alas it keeps trying to round up to the next
"cylinder" boundary, so you have to fiddle a bit to get it right. Yes,
fdisk is a very old, crufty, and slightly buggy program. Newer programs
are either much too "user-friendly" (e.g., cfdisk "enter partition size
in decimal magabytes"), or way too dangerous (e.g., parted, which writes
each change out to disk immediately without giving you a chance to
verify what it just did).
--
Bob Nichols "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
Do NOT delete it.