[H-GEN] Partition table recovery.

[gavin duley]

On 26 Oct 2010, at 22:42, Gmail wrote:

>> Attempting to format to ext2 (?) fails.
> 
> Yep. There must be a valid part-tab before a filesystem can be written.

Good point. This confused me a little, for some reason.

>> .. boot a livecd .. use a program like gpart or fdisk .. to recover or .. start again.
> 
> This is standard operating procedure.

Yes. I'd have probably just suggested something similar to this first thing, except that to begin with I thought there was data on the disc that needed to be recovered...

>> Boot from a live CD, use dd to wipe the first few blocks, then fdisk to create new partitions.
> 
> Excellent advice and often essential to get past the M$ "protection" schemes which often stop you doing things that are LEGAL. I use:
> 
>> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=10000
> 
> This may be a bit premature, but I'm in process of putting some pages on my site covering this sort of thing. If any of this is useful:
> 
> http://52midnight.com/linux/installation/index.html
> 
> you're welcome to point your friend to it.

Okay, thanks.


On 26 Oct 2010, at 23:39, Snowy Angelique Maslov wrote:
> I would also be one to suggest testdisk as well; I have used it recently and it is very good at detecting partitions and filesystems.  We were able to recover a RAID5 LVM2 setup which had corrupted the partition tables on a couple of drives without issue.   The interface for testdisk does take some getting use to however.

Thanks, testdisk does look like it's worth looking into.

gavin,

-- 
Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'What kind of tea?'
		-- Neil Gaiman

Gavin Duley
<gavin at microcomaustralia.com.au> <gpd at sdf-eu.org>
WWW: http://www.gavinduley.org/