Hello all

One day xp crashed, so I hit the reset button. Upon startup, it told me it couldn't find a file. Booting from the cd I found all my partitions were corrupted (C, D, E, F, G). As I keep nothing on C other than OS, I formatted C and re-installed XP. Now XP's working fine but I can't get into my other partitions.

Browsing on the net I found a linux utility gpart (too young to post URL's, u can find the site fairly easily using google) that could restore the partition table. Drawback - I don't know much about linux. I've plumped to download mandrake in order to run this app and get my stuff back.

What I want to know is can I put mandrake (or any other linux for that matter) on my C drive, alongside XP or otherwise, without jeopardising any chance I have of recovering the data on my other partitions?

Of course, I could just format the whole lot and start over but that would involve losing everything, including over 12 gig of mp3, so it's not the ideal solution.

RSVP
LoD

"One day xp crashed, so I hit the reset button. Upon startup, it told me it couldn't find a file. Booting from the cd I found all my partitions were corrupted (C, D, E, F, G). As I keep nothing on C other than OS, I formatted C and re-installed XP. Now XP's working fine but I can't get into my other partitions."

If you rewrite your partition table EXACTLY like it was before the corruption occured then your will be able to access all of your data. Otherwise the data is lost. The odds are against you.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

I'd suggest forgetting about installing Mandrake. Instead, get the Knoppix Live-CD, boot your machine under it, and then hopefully you should be able to mount those partitions and safely transfer the data elsewhere. You can get Knoppix here www.linuxiso.org among other places. The beauty of the Live CD is that it gives you a fully functional Linux installation without requiring that you physically install anything on the hard drive. (This also is a good way to introduce people to Linux - have them boot Knoppix, use it for a while, but then they can remove the CD and their system is in exactly the same state as they left it.) Good luck with the data recovery, although I'll have to agree with jailbait that recovering from disk corruption is never a sure thing and you may be facing long odds. -- J.W.