Deleted partitions on in use disk
 

oops.

Can I recover the partitions before I reboot and my box won't boot anymore :)

Yes, if you write the exactly same partition table back everything will be as before. You can use testdisk to get clues where the partitions were.

Thanks, that looks like a nice tool, I'm loading it on all my boxen now.

Do not do this !

Execute:
If fdisk can still see your partitions, then just use cfdisk to save (write back) your partition table to your disk. It's much simpler solution.

Only if fdisk cannot see your partition anymore, then you should use testdisk.

.

Not 100% sure, but methinks fdisk -l /dev/sda tries to read the partition table from drive, while plain fdisk -l reads it from /proc ... and may succeed even when the first command fails.

If fdisk, cfdisk, ..., is able to see his partitions, then he should use this tool to write them back to the disk. The whole recovery process would take one second.

PS.
Running TestDisk from the recovered hard disk drive may be not a good idea.

For next time, use gpart
http://repository.slacky.eu/slackwar.../system/gpart/
It helped me to recover partition tables deleted a year earlier (obviously the filesystem was partially damaged, but partition tables was consistently restored)

For next time, use gpart
http://repository.slacky.eu/slackwar.../system/gpart/
It helped me to recover partition tables deleted a year earlier (obviously the filesystem was partially damaged, but partition tables was consistently restored)