Before I return to crying into my coffee, I thought I'd better let you
know about something which just happened to my machine.
I was trying to remove and reassign a logical partition somewhere in the
middle of my disk from Linux-native to split it into an NTFS partition and
a small FAT partition. This was originally /dev/hda5. Using Tom's Boot
floppy and the fdisk there I deleted /dev/hda5, selected 'n' and 'l' to
add a new partition and entered the desired sectors. I did the same for
the smaller FAT partition. I checked that the cylinder numbers did not
overlap. Printing the partition table told me that all the old partitions
were there, and that the new partitions had been assigned as hda11 and
hda12, respectively. I select 'w' to write the partition table, and that's
where things screw up. While sysncing the disk, I get told that I now only
have:
hda1 hda2 <hda5 hda6>
and sure enough, going back into fdisk proves that I have now lost all my
other partitions, and the two new ones have been labelled as hda5 and
hda6.
I'm assuming I've lost my entire linux installation and have to start
again from scratch, but it would be really nice if someone told me there
were a way of restoring my partition table without destroying the data on
the last part of the disk ...
Anyway, I thought I'd better warn those of you who, like me, assumed that
programs like fdisk would do what they were supposed to.
Back to crying into my coffee,
Chris.
-- Chris Green. HEP, Purdue University. CDF SVXII project. Based at Fermilab. MAIL greenc@fnal.gov; PHONE (630) 840-2308