[H-GEN] Partition table recovery

[David Seikel]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2010 21:30:52 +0100 gavin duley
<gavin at microcomaustralia.com.au> wrote:

> a friend recently managed to apparently kill their hard disc using
> gparted. It failed to finish writing the new partition table, and now
> gives the error "invalid partition table". Not sure of what
> distribution they're using yet, or what other OSes they have on the
> disc, but will find out soon hopefully.
> 
> Is there any way to recover or recreate the partition table without
> losing all the data on the drive?

If you have the details of the original partition table, or feel
confident you can recreate it using obvious values, then you could just
re partition it once more.  As Stephen said, back up the blocks of the
hard drive first if there is anything important on it.

A while ago I had used fdisk to partition the wrong device, but I had
done fdisk -l to list all partitions on all drives first.  So it was
simply a matter of restoring the partitions using the information still
on screen from that list.

It would be useful to know why gparted failed.  Is the hard drive
failing anyway?  Backups are useful things.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.humbug.org.au/pipermail/general/attachments/20101026/76749ebe/attachment.sig>