While playing with ipodlinux, I accidentally deleted the partition table of my /home disk (/dev/sda, while / is on /dev/sdb and the ipod was /dev/sdc, I did a dd if=something of=/dev/sda instead of of=/dev/sdc, kind of stupid, no ?).

/dev/sda was still mounted (/dev/sda5 as home, /dev/sda6 as /media/sda6), while the partition table of /dev/sda was replaced with that of the ipod . I made an emergency backup of all the files on /dev/sda5 and /dev/sda6 (on the hard disk of the ipod ) and rewrote a new partition table on /dev/sda, but here is my question, out of curiosity and in prevision of my next mistake :

given that all the partitions on the disk were still mounted, was there anyway to get the correct partition table out of some place (the kernel ?) ?

I'm not asking here for gpart or testdisk (both of which failed to restore the partition table, by the way), but of a way to squeeze the partition table out of the kernel.

Thanks in advance for your help

/proc/partitions has useful info. With a calculator, you can recover your table.

Thanks man.

Hi,

Lost or deleted partition can be saved using Partition Table Doctor Recovery tool.
It can easily restore lost partition, as it did for me before.
Really great tool, with awesome restore algorithms. Give it a try. Recommended!

If you overwrote the first sector of /dev/sda, you'll also have overwritten your MBR. Restoring it should be as simple as rerunning lilo or grub-install. If you were using the Windows bootloader on the MBR, you can boot off of a rescue disk and fdisk /mbr or fixmbr should take care of it.

@terrytree : thanks; but partition recovering softwares all need unmounting. I wanted recovery without unmounting, for which the /proc/partitions way was the best.

@btmiller : you sure are right, except that in my case, grub is on /dev/sdb (I know, I'm a perv).