I have 2 hard drives on my older computer, the older one with windows ME, and Mandrake, and the newer drive which has Kubuntu. What has happened, is that the id10ts that write the updates for Kubuntu started modifying the grub list.menu, and as a result they wrote over my boot menu before I was aware they had modified my grub conf menu.
The next time I booted up winME, it did a disk scan and completely over wrote my partitions and made one big C partition. I have not written to this disk since, and I have my original partition table saved and would like to re-write it to the hard-drive to recover my photos. ( I have photos on my fat 32 and my ext3 partitions )
My original partition table looks like this:
type name size start and end
/hda1 win95 fat32 C 2.9gig Cyl 0-382
/hda 5 " D 11gig Cyl 383-1877
/hda8 " E 11gig Cyl 3373-4865
/hda6 Ext2 Boot 2gig Cyl 1878-2139 ( 83 )
/hda9 ext3 /root 5.3gig cyl 2149-2849
/hda11 ext3 /home 3.7gig cyl 2881-3372

This is the table I want to restore, can someone give me a step by step of the commands I need to use to do the re-write. I know that it isn't that difficult to do, but it has been so long since I have had to do a repair that I want to ensure that I do it correctly the first time. All I want to do is recover my pictures and data, or maybe even get the Mandrake linux working again so that I can extract everything of value before the drive dies.
Thanks and Happy New Year,
Bob

If t'was me I'd use testdisk to do all the grunt work, but if you insist on fdisk...
Just run it (as root), then as it says, use "m" to see the commands you need. "n" to add a new partition - you may be able to give non-sequential partition numbers, I can't remember - then follow the prompts to use cylinder allocation.
"w" to write the disk, "yes" to confirm.
Reboot, and see what happens.

If it's wrong, no harm done, do it all again.

Note my sigline ...

1 members found this post helpful.

I was wondering if you could use a live disc to recover your pictures?

What they use...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testdisk

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorec

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

That data is not just one partition table....

The first 4 partitions are in the MBR (1st sector of the disk), and then each logical partition (#5 and higher) is defined in a linked list using another partition table for each of the logical partitions.

Given that you have the data, it is certainly possible to re-construct things, but it will take a bit of hand work. It **might** be easier to just use Photorec.

One thing to consider is to clone the disk before starting to do anything.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks All for the replies. I didn't think it was worth while to attempt to back up the corrupted contents because it is possible that winders has already overwritten my data. I'll have a look at test disk right now before I attempt the re-write.
Thanks for the ideas, and Happy New Year
Bob