[ILUG] Dead disc?

[Brendan Halpin]

On Wed, Oct 06 2010, Brendan Halpin wrote:

> Thanks everyone for the suggestions.
>
> Pádraig Brady wrote:
>
>> sounds like someone messed with your partition table
>> (using a "recovery cd" of some sort?).
>
> That's what I'm thinking. 
>
>> You should then be able to use grub and fdisk
>> to recreate mbr and partition tables etc.
>> If you don't know offsets then you may need
>> to search for your file systems with something
>> like gpart.
>
> OK, that's where I am, and I've just got gpart to spit out a lot of
> numbers to me which look like my missing partitions, with size and
> offset in megabytes. How do I use this? Via fdisk? gparted?

Philip Trickett pointed me to "gpart -W ..." and now I can read several,
but not all, of my partitions (home, /, /usr) which means I can see my
fstab. That shows that I did use LVM the last time (I don't understand
LVM!) and that I am missing /var /and /usr/local -- it would be good to
have these back too. Looking at it in GParted doesn't help: 100%
unallocated according to that!

fdisk gives this:

+---------------------------------------------------------------------
|Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
|255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
|Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
|Disk identifier: 0x38000000
|
|   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
|/dev/sda1               1        1305    10482376    7  HPFS/NTFS
|/dev/sda2            1306        3736    19527000    7  HPFS/NTFS
|/dev/sda3            3737        4399     5325547+   5  Extended
|/dev/sda4            7586       19196    93265324   83  Linux
|/dev/sda5   *        3750        3791      337333+  83  Linux
|/dev/sda6            3792        4764     7815591   83  Linux
|/dev/sda7   ?      186466      186580      917750+  ed  Unknown
+---------------------------------------------------------------------

These start and ends look crazy to me. Shouldn't the end of sda3 overlap
with the logical partitions it contains? I presume the start and end for
sda7 are just nonsense?


Puzzled,

Brendan
-- 
Brendan Halpin,  Department of Sociology,  University of Limerick,  Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F1-009 x 3147
mailto:brendan.halpin at ul.ie  http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html