I got a new computer which is running an XP. I want to repartition the disk so that I can have enough space for Slackware installation. I booted my machine with ZenLive CD and run 'gparted'. During the operation, I had wrongly clicked 'set disklabel' menu and answered 'yes'. After that I suddenly realized I would be doing something stupid and exit. I reboot the computer and the XP won't be able to start up, it seemed all partitions to have gone.

My questions are:
1. I have never had an idea about disklabel in Windows XP world. What is the disklable and what is it used for?
2. How to recover partitions after setting 'disklabel'?

Any suggestions are welcome.

Chunhua

This is half-related: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=240730 (it mentions RAID, but it's not the focus of the post). It recommends running Chkdsk in DOS (although I don't know how you'd get to DOS...). Changing the disklabel I think alters the partition table (maybe) and probably formats the drive. Did you have any valuable data on it? (If so, you may wish to try data recovery tools...) If not, it would probably be best to reinstall (if you can). Are you able to reinstall XP (ie do you have a recovery CD/DVD or do you have an actual XP CD)?

Good luck...

[edit] TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) supposedly can fix partition tables, but I don't know if it would work in this case.[/edit]

Thanks for replying.

It is a new computer, there is no valuable data so I can reinstall XP without problems. The only thing is that the disk was originally in two partitions, with one partition for factory recovery (I can press one button to recovery the machine into factory settings and all device drivers are ok) and the other one with XP. I won't be able to get factory recovery with one press.

I doubt that DOS Chkdsk can do the job because the Win98 Chkdsk cannot recognise the NTFS partitions. At any way I will try chkdsk first to see what happens.

Chunhua

From the liveCD, run this from a terminal (may need sudo/root)

I looked into that kind of problem some days before. You can do a search for "55aa" pattern which indicates the end of a partition and then manually try to repair the disc. If that works if you have deleted both partitions (the example I had dealt with one working and one deleted partitions, I don't know). Unluckily I used to German articles on this topic, I guess you cannot read them?

The two sites I used:
http://linuxwiki.de/VerlorenePartitionFinden
http://ivs.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/bs/le...01/bs2/partfs/

From what I understood you use "dd if=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 | xxd | tail -n5 " (of course sdb as an example only) to watch the partition table. In link 2 there is a table that shows what info you got, there's for sure an English version somewhere in the net.
In link 1 there is a small script that searches for the 55aa-pattern. Maybe google language tools are your friend to translate it Good luck!

boot windows xp disc - select recovery mode, then you can run chkdsk and fixboot

I had a similar problem in that I formatted a over a partition containing data by mistake and got some help on this list.

There is a linux ap named testdisk that will repair damaged partitions that you may be able to use. You will need to have it on a live cd though to run it in your situation

That post was here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...light=testdisk

HTH

Hi,
You could download 'SystemRescueCd' or 'UBCD Ultimate Boot CD' which have 'test-disk'.

These links and others are available from 'Slackware-Links' .