Help, partition disaster
 

Yesterday when I was setting up a my system new system I seemed to have a disaster. I used cfdisk from MEPIS to put one small parition at the beginning of my empty STA drive to put windows on.

That seemed fine but when I rebooted it was there but all of the partitions on my 160gbEIDI drive had been wiped out and replaced by one 137gb unreadable partition and nothing else.

Any thoughs on how it might be possible to undue the disaster? I could lose the first 20gigs or so of the drive becuase it was just windows. But the rest has a ton of irreplacable stuff and I'm kind of screwed.

Do you have your old partition table entries saved somewhere? Maybe at least the start sectors and end sectors? If you do, just rewrite your partition table with the old values (I'm sure you can guess the types and other stuff) and if nothing's been overwritten yet you can probably still get in.

If not, then sorry, I've no idea (but that would be a good thing to backup---a hard copy---once you have a working system again).

If you remember approximately how you created the partitions in the first place (ie. did you tell fdisk start sectors and end sectors or would you have been more likely to say 20000M or 20480M? -- that sort of thing), then you could try guessing up a new table and giving it a shot. Rewriting a new partition table won't in itself hurt you any further; it's only if you format any of those partitions that you lose data (although that could be false with RAID or LVM, I don't know). In other words, one can generally trash one's partition table n times, rewrite the correct table, and the data will be untouched and perfectly readable. So if you have important stuff it might be worth playing around with the table.

GR