RESOLVED: VERY OT, But this guy really needs help

[Mike McCarty]

Mike McCarty wrote:
> Over on the Debian lists is a guy who clobbered his partitions

[snip]

Just got this on Debian. Thanks very much all who responded.

> So I got up this morning (on the west coast, as you hoped), booted up
> into knoppix again, and started backing up my MBR and first sector of
> each partition.  Then I noticed an icon on the knoppix desktop listing
> hda7 as a mountable partition, so I thought I'd try it again.  Exactly
> the same way as last night,
> 
> sudo mount /dev/hda7 /mnt
> 
> but it mounted!!!  No errors.  So I immediately backed up off-site
> everything I might possibly need, including the MBR and first sectors
> of each partition.  Then rebooted without knoppix, making no changes,
> and success!  I even have the two new partitions I wanted.
> 
> I remember now that cfdisk warns you that you may need to reboot in
> order to read the new partition table properly, but it just didn't
> occur to me this time.  I'm sure glad I didn't start deleting and
> re-creating the partition table.
> 
> Several lessons learned, a _relatively_ easy way:
> 
> 1.  backups don't count unless you have them on hand
> 
> 2.  in addition to data, back up the MBR and first sector of each
> partition before messing with the partition table:
> dd if=/dev/hda of=hda.mbr bs=512 count=1
> dd if=/dev/hdax of=hdax.mbr bs=512 count=1
> 
> 3.  after changing your partition table, you really do have to reboot
> - at least this is my best guess as to what the problem was.
> 
> Thank you for all your efforts Mike!  I'll return the favour to
> someone if I can't to you  :) 


Mike
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