Well, this is not good. After running testdisk i must have "deleted" my Freespire partition. Sigh. Under Control Panel, Volume Manager, i only have winxp now. i haven't turned off my computer, thinking that if i do, i will only have access to xp again. i can't figure out how to get testdisk to "recover" the other partition. i wonder if GParted would work... Under Control Center, Partitions, it still shows rootfs, /, reiserfs, 28,050 MB, etc. as well as the /mnt/winxp partition, so i suppose i still "have" my partition, it's just not listed in the Volume Manager. i wonder how i can put it back...

Have a great afternoon!

P.S. 1 - Downloaded & installed GParted & ran it. It shows one WinXP partition and another, 27 gig., unallocated, partition. It also gives the 1st Sector of the unallocated partition as well as the last one. Is this sufficient enough info. to reestablish this partition as reiserfs, w/o losing any info.?

At this moment i'm using Freespire. From the same machine. i can run as root. Uh, i'm connected to the internet. i´ve printed documents to a local, usb, printer. i get e-mail and have sent a couple; used OpenOffice to work on powerpoint.

Hope i can keep this partition or at least figure out which file has been changed that Volume Manager accesses and change it back!

I'm surprised testdisk isn't helping here. And I don't know Freespire, so bear that in mind.
If it were me, I'd be writing down /etc/fstab, /etc/mtab and /proc/partitions before doing anything.
If you think all that (unallocated) space is your missing partition, simply use cfdisk to reallocate it. Take all the defaults (start and end). Turns out only the start is really important. Good idea to check the block count you saved from /proc/partitions. If you allocate it bigger than before, that's fine. If you get it wrong, just use cfdisk to delete it again - no damage done. You can always use something like knoppix to do any further work if the reboot fails.
Think of it as a learning opportunity.

Syg00, thanks a lot for your response! i've been working on this for about 12 hrs. now and finally someone has responded. i stopped using Testdisk after my unfortunate experience with it. That's why i downloaded and ran GPartEd. It has a much better gui and i used it to repartition my orig. WinXP hard disk in order to accomodate this Freespire install which has been working just fine until that fateful night...

i have made a hard copy of my /etc/fstab, my /etc/mtab but my /proc/partitions says "Empty Document, 0 (zero) B.

i've been rereading your post and have now figured out "If you think all that...". i suppose i could run cfdisk in what, a root window? i just love it when you say, "...learning opportunity."

My system is working fine at this moment. i haven't rebooted or anything yet, so i've got internet, e-mail, printer, OpenOffice and save to disk, internet radio, etc. This is really strange.

Well, here goes. Have a great evening!

Testdisk and gparted are not equivalent products.
They have totally different design goals - I suspect you used testdisk for the wrong job. gparted (and its cousins) are for (re-)partitioning and resizing.
testdisk is for partition recovery

If what I'm guessing is true, give testdisk another go - it should find your old partitions again. What may have happened when you first ran it was that it "recovered" to before you created the Linux partition.

O.K. sy, i'll give it a go. Have a great, what is Australia, day!?

i ran across this command and here are its results...

steve@LaGrandota:~$ /sbin/debugreiserfs /dev/hda2
debugreiserfs 3.6.19 (2003 www.namesys.com)


Filesystem state: consistency is not checked after last mounting

Reiserfs super block in block 16 on 0x302 of format 3.6 with standard journal
Count of blocks on the device: 7181040
Number of bitmaps: 220
Blocksize: 4096
Free blocks (count of blocks - used [journal, bitmaps, data, reserved] blocks):529262
Root block: 2687117
Filesystem is NOT clean
Tree height: 5
Hash function used to sort names: "r5"
Objectid map size 268, max 972
Journal parameters:
Device [0x0]
Magic [0x565ad97c]
Size 8193 blocks (including 1 for journal header) (first block 18)
Max transaction length 1024 blocks
Max batch size 900 blocks
Max commit age 30
Blocks reserved by journal: 0
Fs state field: 0x0:
sb_version: 2
inode generation number: 1906117
UUID: d868fc75-4d7d-442e-89ec-5b57639588a5
LABEL:
Set flags in SB:
ATTRIBUTES CLEAN

From the above can you tell whether there is hope or not? Have a great evening! ____________________________