Hello:

I was having a problem with Windows bluescreening within 2 seconds of starting up due to a corrupt driver, so I reinstalled it. Upon doing so and using my FC4 DVD to reinstall GRUB, I find that my FAT32 data partition, /dev/hda7, has vanished into free space.

Now I managed to use Windows to call the space a partition without formatting it, then went back into FC4 to change the label to VFAT, but it won't read anything. It says something about a bad superblock, etc etc.

Now a good majority of the 25GB of stuff on that drive has been backed up, but that backup is from June, before I got my high-speed internet in August. So that means anything I've downloaded in the last four months is gone, along with my entire music library and my VMWare disk image (4GB or so) for running DeLorme TopoUSA while in Linux (I started using Linux in July).

Does anyone know if there's any way to get it to read from /dev/hda7 successfully? I'd rather not reformat that partition and have to dig up my backups and redownload everything I've lost.

Windows claims that it's not formatted, and Fedora claims it's not vfat.

Thanks.

- Trip

Heard of Knoppix?

Boot from the Knoppix (Live) CD, and see if it helps you recognize your paritition fine.

Nope.

- Trip

http://www.knoppix.org/


You can also follow the instructions here...

How to get set downloading a Linux ISO.

Knoppix will boot from a CD...and detect all of your partitions automatically.
If knoppix can't do it, then i don't think anything else can do it.
Knoppix is the best FREE backup tool available.

I'm fully aware of what Knoppix does and how it works. It didn't detect it.

- Trip

You should always reply in full sentences to avoid confusion.

Yes, well I'm very upset by my loss of 25GB of data from the last 7 years.

- Trip