Broken partitions
 

Hello!

Hope someone here can help me...
I have a dual-boot system (Win XP and Fedora Core 2).
This is how my drive was partitioned (from memory :():

hda1 - Primary, Bootable, Active - NTFS
...
...
hda5 - FAT32
hda6 - NTFS - Windoze XP installed here (yup, not on the primary partition)
hda7 - ext3 - Linux boot
hda8 - ext3 - Fedora Core2 installed here
hda9 - linux swap

For some (unfortunate) reasons I did the following things to my /dev/hda:

1. Resize down the hda5 partition with parted by placing the End to something like 60 000. -- I wanted more space for the hda6 partition but I changed my mind when it came to changing the Start of hda6 - it would have screwed with my XP boot sequence, right?

2. Tried to fix the Fedora Core 2 bug - the one which prevents XP from booting by specifying a bad disk geometry (lwn.net/Articles/86835/) - although my sistem booted XP just fine.
I issued:
Due to warnings that the hda5 partition does not end on a cylinder boundary I tried to...

3. Resize up the hda5 partition the maximum extent possible. I entered in parted as the End address for hda5 the Start address for hda6.

After this step mounting either hda5 or hda6 would result in a

.

and XP failing to boot with a file not found or corrupted error about a hal.dll if i'm not mistaking.

5. As these partitions contain important data I tried to fix what I've done. I tried to resize back hda5, but I couldn't do anyting to the hda5 or hda6 partitions with neither fdisk, sfdisk or parted as they would issue some errors as "bad partition, you have done somthing to it you bad boy!".

4. Growing desperate I tried fixboot and fixmbr from the XP install CD. These command totally screwed-up my partition table so every linux/windoze partitioning tool now sees only one large partition on the drive.

So... what to do... Help! Please bear in mind that i'm a linux rookie. The most important data is on the hda6 XP partition (My Documents and .mbx files -- my emails).


Thank you in advance.


Cristi D.

try some partiton recovery tool
i know one of

Acronis Partittion recovery

regards

Actually i used a system rescue linux live cd which had a program called Gpart which guesses how your partitions were, prior to the destruction and rewrites the partition table based on these guesses. So I managed to boot XP and save my hda6. Afterwards i could have used some data recovery software (something like getdataback) on my hda5 but XP had chkdsk-it at start-up and made a mess full of .chk files on it so I let it go...

Hope this helpes someone...

Cristi D.