Recover stupid mistake

[Roberto Ragusa]

Mike Martin wrote:

> Well I've made some progress, I have my /,boot and home via parted rescue

> Only problem is that now parted only sees swap as p4, rather than an
> extended partition with swap and my main 711 Gig storage partition

You know where the extended partition starts and ends, you just miss
the end-of-swap/begin-of-data position.
I suppose your swap partition is a well rounded number (1G? 1.5G? 2G?).
Can you read any logs generated when the system was ok?
Or you can try a trick like this:

  [root at thinkpad ~]# file -s /dev/sda7
  /dev/sda7: Linux/i386 swap file (new style) 1 (4K pages) size 1222821 pages
  [root at thinkpad ~]$ bc
  bc 1.06
  Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
  For details type `warranty'.
  1222821*4096
  5008674816
  quit
  [rragusa at thinkpad ~]$

where I understand that my swap partition is around 5,000,000,000 bytes,
which is probably what fdisk gave me for "+5G".

I think the partition size is written into swap space by mkswap, so you
will have the correct number even if you temporarily create a bigger
swap extending partly into your 711G partition.

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it