Lost partition table
 

I have a dual boot Toshiba Portege 7200ct laptop with win98 on a 5gig partition & Mandrake 8.0 on the other 6gig partition.
I went to do a re-install of Mandrake but disk drake cant read my partition table. As far as disk drake is concerned I have 11gig's of free space.
I am not going to format it all & start again cos I will lose windows & I would have to re-install it over the network from a DOS network boot floopy (which I dont want to do).
Can anyone point me in the right direction of getting the partition table back so I can do clean install over the existing (corrupt) mandrake.
If you need more details just let me now...
Cheer's

amp2000

Just a theory here (not to be put into action):

If you were to tell DiskDrake the exact proportions of the partitions used, but not format them (i.e. tell it that the 1st 5Gb was for Windows (but be specific down the to cylinder if you can)) wouldn't all the data previously held by them still be there, you'd just need to tell it where to look?

For example:
If you only had 2 partitions (hda1 and hda2?) of 5Gb Fat32 and 6Gb ext2 respectively, if you used diskdrake and told it that the 1st partition was 5Gb FAT32 partition with a mountpoint of /mnt/windows and the second was a 6Gb ext2 partition with a mountpoint of / , would you still be able to access the Win files from within Lin? And therefore be able to get Lilo to recognise it and dual boot?

Must repeat: JUST A THEORY - NOT TO BE PUT INTO ACTION.

Thanks for replying
Unfortunately I dont remember exactly what size the partitions were, especially as specific as cylinder size.

Dunno if it's relevant but when I boot up from the hard drive I get the error "kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 03:05"

Pleeeez Help

amp2000

can you not get into windows and use scandisk or something? I'm pretty sure norton utilities can sort that out.

I can get into windows no problem but I didnt think scandisk would do anything to fix it. I havent got Norton.
Im in work at the moment but I'll try scandisk when I get home in a couple of hours.
Cheer's.........

amp2000

Nope scandisk didnt work & while I was checking it out to see could diskdrake see the parttion table, I accidentally started formatting the HD.
Ah well I guess I'll just have to have a windows free laptop ;)

P.S. I like this forum....I can see myself coming back here very soon.........

amp2000

There's 2 apps I use for getting a pt back, and thats gpart and testdisk. Both have test modi for scanning HD's for lost pt's and can work with manual CHS overrides. Search for testdisk, Grenier. Gpart is at freshmeat, IIRC.

*These tools is good to have around, as well as a floppy-bootable bootmanager like GAG, especially since I don't fully trust Partition Magic anymore. Ive seen it fu quite heavily after juggling partitions a few times.