How to rescue your partitions after upgrade to Fedora 18 Alpha eats them

[Jakub Kicinski]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2012 08:36:41 -0500, "Mikkel L. Ellertson"
<mellertson at gmail.com> wrote:

>On 09/24/2012 07:39 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>> On Sun, 2012-09-23 at 13:33 +0200, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
>>> I recently had a weird problem after "upgrade" to Fedora 18 Alpha. I
>>> decided to share the solution, maybe it will help someone.
>>
>> This should be posted to the Fedora test list, not here. F18 is not a
>> released system.
>>
>> poc
>>
>One program I did not see talked about is testdisk. It is designed
>to find deleted partitions. I have not needed to use it for real,
>but I have deliberately messed up a partition table to see how well
>it works. It does a great job on drives that have only been
>partitioned and formatted once. If you have had different
>partitioning sachems, you may have to pick out the correct
>partitions from a list of partitions it finds. But it usually isn't
>too hard.

Well I didn't mention it because I said:

> anaconda [...] removes magic numbers from partitions superblocks [...]
and
> none of automatic "lost partition detection" tool could find them.

I tried testdisk with a few different settings, none of them worked.
Only partition it was kind of able to detect was the first on (/boot)
and even there it messed up starting point (2046 instead of 2048
sector).

But yes, nevertheless, if someone "just" wipes out his MBR testdisk
would be very useful I agree.

  -- Kuba