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Old 07-29-2003, 11:45 PM   #1
illtbagu
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Registered: Dec 2002
Location: Nevada
Distribution: fedora, RHEL, ubuntu, suse
Posts: 343

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lost fat partitions during red hat 9.0 install


to make this long story shot i tried installing red hat 9.0 on second drive i have recently purchased i managed to somehow screw up my other drive in the process. or maybe it wasnt me. im not sure. this is probly my 30th install of redhat and i just dont think it was my fault. but anyways i have somehow manged to delete the partitions on this drive. i had 3 fat32 partitions that i need. i have tried to use testdisk
http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html
with no luck. it doesn't seem to have detected anything except 1 big /boot 80 gigs to be exact. the boot loader is still up and going lilo is still trying to boot the OS. i haven't installed any thing on this drive since the partitions have disappeared. what can i do? am i hosed? should i start looking for a windows based app to try and fix this or does linux have something that will do the job?

thanks for any help

AD
 
Old 07-30-2003, 12:04 AM   #2
scott_R
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Registered: Jul 2003
Location: Brighton, Michigan, USA
Distribution: Lots of distros in the past, now Linux Mint
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gpart might be able to help, but I've never used it. There is a little information on the web for the program, but the home page won't come up for me. Seems like a lot of distros include it, so it might be on your rescue disk or installation disks already. There is a quick description of how to use it here:

http://public.www.planetmirror.com/pub/gpart/

Like I said, I haven't used it, so I can't offer any advice, sorry.

Last edited by scott_R; 07-30-2003 at 12:06 AM.
 
Old 07-30-2003, 10:13 AM   #3
Alf829
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Registered: Jul 2003
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Hi illtbagu,

If you're more familiar with windows, then you should probably take your broken drive and put it in another computer running windows and try to recover the partition table for it.

When you first installed linux, did you by any chance select one of the default setups ie desktop, server, etc? I remember seeing a warning somewhere that there should be a prompt somewhere for you to choose to keep all previous partitions but I can't remember in which type of setup.

I'm not too sure about these types of situations, but partition magic might be able to help you on this. If not, try searching on google and should be quite a lot of windows based progs that will come up. Off the top of my head, there's a program a friend of mine used called "hard drive mechanic"? that he said was quite good.

If it's only the partitions table, then everything should be ok. If you managed to make an 80GB boot partition for linux, then things aren't looking that great.

Hope this helps and good luck on your recovery.

Cheers,
alf829
 
Old 07-30-2003, 10:52 PM   #4
illtbagu
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Registered: Dec 2002
Location: Nevada
Distribution: fedora, RHEL, ubuntu, suse
Posts: 343

Original Poster
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well i thank you guys for trying to solve my problem for me. as much as i like linux I'm going to haft to temporarily install windows on my computer. i haven't had windows loaded on my system in 7 months what a sad sad story. this is too bad. i took your advise scott_R and i posted my results below when using gpart. it looks like there is some hope yet. I'm not sure if i should be blaming myself on this one or not. 99% of the problems i have had in the past using linux i have always blamed on my self. but you know what i just don't feel that i was doing anything to cause this problem. i am very paranoid when it comes to formatting and installing operating systems on my computer i always go over everything 3 or 4 times in my head. as much as i hate to say it I'm going to haft to depend on windows to solve my problem right now I'm just not trusting linux enough at this point to go for the fix with gpart or any other GPL software right now. i need something with a GUI with a help menu. yes yes i know if you cant use the command line in linux your a brain dead monkey

I SURE DONT WANT TO FUCK THIS ONE UP

so Alf829 I'm taking your advise about using windows instead. thanks

just so you know how appreciative i am, I'm going to say it 1 more time thanks

[root@localhost gpart-0.1h]# /home/joe/gpart-0.1h/bin/gpart -E /dev/hdg

Begin scan...
Possible partition(Linux ext2), size(203mb), offset(0mb)
Possible partition(Linux ext2), size(10762mb), offset(203mb)
Possible partition(Linux swap), size(1027mb), offset(10966mb)
Possible partition(DOS FAT), size(16998mb), offset(11993mb)
Possible partition(DOS FAT), size(10205mb), offset(28992mb)

* Warning: short read near sector(80293059), 64512 bytes instead of 66048. Skipping...
End scan.

Checking partitions...

* Warning: more than 4 primary partitions: 5.
Partition(Linux ext2 filesystem): primary
Partition(Linux ext2 filesystem): primary
Partition(Linux swap or Solaris/x86): primary
Partition(DOS or Windows 95 with 32 bit FAT): primary
Partition(DOS or Windows 95 with 32 bit FAT): invalid primary
Ok.

Guessed primary partition table:
Primary partition(1)
type: 131(0x83)(Linux ext2 filesystem)
size: 203mb #s(417626) s(63-417688)
chs: (0/1/1)-(414/5/62)d (0/1/1)-(414/5/62)r

Primary partition(2)
type: 131(0x83)(Linux ext2 filesystem)
size: 10762mb #s(22041112) s(417753-22458864)
chs: (414/7/1)-(1023/15/63)d (414/7/1)-(22280/9/58)r

Primary partition(3)
type: 130(0x82)(Linux swap or Solaris/x86)
size: 1027mb #s(2104448) s(22458933-24563380)
chs: (1023/15/63)-(1023/15/63)d (22280/11/1)-(24368/6/59)r

Primary partition(4)
type: 011(0x0B)(DOS or Windows 95 with 32 bit FAT)
size: 16998mb #s(34812855) s(24563385-59376239)
chs: (1023/15/63)-(1023/15/63)d (24368/7/1)-(58904/15/63)r

[root@localhost gpart-0.1h]#

Last edited by illtbagu; 07-30-2003 at 11:43 PM.
 
  


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