Hello all. While trying to get Grub working on my computer, I accidentially overwrote the partition table. Luckily I did a fdisk -l and copied the information before I did anything. The problem is that the first partition "does not end on cylinder boundary" so when I recreated the partition info using fdisk, partition 2 doesn't start in the right place and cannot be read. I have some pretty valuable data on there and I can't afford to lose it. Is there a way to create a partition that doesn't start on a cylinder boundary?

You could try using testdisk. It is available in several rescue distributions of Linux such as the System Rescue CD. See my signature for the URL.

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I'm sorry, I'm not sure how to recover from this problem without losing data, but I can tell you what causes it: Using different partitioning tools to manage your partitions.

The problem you're experiencing is caused by using Microsoft's partitioning tools and then modifying your partitions with something else.

Microsoft's method of setting partitions must be very different from everyone else's. For this reason, I always use GNU fdisk from a Slackware installation disc to partition my drives, or manage/modify them. It doesn't matter what OS I'm going to install, or which filesystems I'm going to use, this is always the first step whenever I install new drives.

I hate to admit to this, but it ain't (only) M$ofts fault.
Various changes to Linux tools also exposes issues. Changes in defaults from cylinder to {mega|giga}-byte allocation for example. Allocations with one can make a mess if restored with a different version for example.

As suggested, testdisk is the answer generally.