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Re: Trashed DOS partition table



On Sun, 13 Oct 1996, Randy Wright wrote:

> > My 2nd hard drive is no longer recognized by Windows or Linux.
<snip>
> > I am afraid to use FDISK to recreate the partitions because
> > it is supposed to be destructive. I looked at FIPS.EXE, but
> > it can't help in my case.
<snip>
> I ran into this when I was developing partitioning tools a number of
> years ago. IF you know exactly what the partitions are supposed to be
> AND it was only the paritition tables that have been damaged, then you
> probably can restore the beastie  with fdisk. However, It does not make
> sense that win95 over-wrote your partition table when you hit the power
> button. But with microsoft non-sense is the general order of the day
> so who knows..

I understand that the drive was taken to Chief in the meantime, but anyway...
If the drive contained Dos/Win partitions - it is better to recover those 
with Linux's fdisk (or even better cfdisk) because DOS's fdisk writes a 
couple of bytes of the begining of partitions it creates.
Linux fdisk/cfdisk doesnt - not even on DOS partitions (and thats why it 
stated in the cfdisk manual that this should be done manually so that can 
recognise newly formed DOS partitions made by cfdisk).

In your case that would mean, of course, that it would be wiser to use 
Linux's fdisk version so that data wont be destroyed.
Details can be found on cfdisk's man pages.

Hope I helped someone that might stock with such a problem.

 WARNING! - this is all AFAIK, no strings attached, standart disclaimer
apply etc. - dealing with fdisk and part. tables is a delicate matter and
i wouldnt wont anyone to send their thesys to the bit bucket on account of
my leak of knowledge! 

G.

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