Partitions + recovery + FAT + ReiserFS + a complete idiot
 

My situation is :
SuSe 8.1 ,14.3 GB Maxtor hard disk ,Windows 98 ......
In the beginning I had Windows on my first partition ,another FAT partition ,two reiser partitions and at the end of the disk another FAT partition as far as I remember .
As my space on my 2nd reiser partition was all gone I decided that I could just enlarge it using yast2 .It told me that a problem occured and that it would be really stupid to continue (...and I was stupid enough !).... I ignored the warning.
Yast seemed to have done what I wanted .The reiser partition was now 5.7 GB big .
Big mess occurred when I went into Windows fdisk to do something minor ... might be create a FAT partition because Windows wasn't happy with the one created in Linux .
Suddenly my newly enlarged partition (reiser) had some completely invalid size (e.g. -154651) .
Got fed up with Windows and deleted the first (WinOS) partition .
Changed the start and end numbers of my enlarged partition in yast to it's normal numbers (start and end numbers were also completely rubbish) .Set filesystem to Linux native (no formating) but could not read from it ..... no filesystem found probably was the error message .
By this time the other partitions must have had another problem as I deleted the partition table in Linux fdisk to reinstall Windows .
Downloaded Acronis Recovery Expert Demo and it told me that it can recover 2 of the 3 partitions I want back as one of them is "intersecting" with another partition .
That"s propably the enlarged one .
I now have created the partitions again in yast x-ept the enlarged one as I am no longer sure where it exactly is .
I have tried reiserfsck and it just tells me that it can't open the filesystem .
fsck.msdos tells me that it supports 2 FATs at the moment and not 25.

My partition table at the moment :
/dev/hda 0-1867 14.3 GB Maxtor
/dev/hda1 0-36 Win95 My current WinOS that I used to run Recovery X-pert.
/dev/hda2 37-121 ReiserFS My current Linux for trying to recover stuff but failing.
/dev/hda3 122-522 ReiserFS Want to recover.
/dev/hda4 523-1867 Extended Extended Partition.
/dev/hda5 555-1030 Win95 Want to recover.

1066-1867 might be where the enlarged partition is.

Is findfs any use for this ?

Thanx already a lot in advance for helping me recover from my stupidity .
Really good forum.

:Pengy:

Yes, trying to reconstruct the partition table could have done the trick if you didn't try to willfully destroy your system. Did you try "gpart"? You may need to patch it with the headerfile from Reiser if it's not already. Shame you have to learn not ignoring what an O.S. says the hard way.

solution was ...
 

.. years later follow up for the curious & ones in the same situation ..

I solved the problem back then - recreated the partition table - by using the great "testdisk" :)