[Techtalk] Partitioning issues.

[Conor Daly]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 01:13:17PM -0500 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Staci thought:
> On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Conor Daly wrote:
> > If she's dealing only with _primary_ partitions all should be well since
> > primary partition info is stored at the start of the drive.  Extended
> > partitions are a different matter since they store the partition info
> > within the partition itself.  If Stacci's disk had all primary partitions,
> > they should be recoverable.  If they're logical drives inside extended
> > partitions, the info may be lost.
> 
> 
> That might be the problem, the reason all the suggestions haven't worked.
> I had a primary, deleted it, turned it into two logicals, and now turned it back into one primary.

If your original partition was a primary, it could still be rocoverable.
Can you tell us what the partition names were/are?  The original primary
sshould be hda1 (assuming primary master disk which this ain't since you
said it only had music on and I've never heard of bootable music!).
Anyway,  the origiinal primary should be hda1.  Any logical partitions
will be hda5 and higher along with a primary labelled as "extended".  If
you made a primary (hda1), an extended (hda2) with a logical (hda5)
inside, remaking the primary may leave the disk recoverable but with
corruption since the logical (hda5) info will be stored somewhere within
the former filesystem.  If you made two logicals (hda5,6) you'll have had
to make a primary, extended (hda1) first.  Now, this may be a problem
since the logical info will now be at the start of the extended (right on
top of the original primary's first superblock.  There may be light
however:  An ext2 filesystem contains backups of the superblock at various
points along the fs.  You can do 

e2fsck -b xxxx

where xxxx is the position of the spare superblock.  See 'man e2fsck' for
details.  It's possible that this option will work if you have remade your
original partition first.

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
---------------------
Faenor.cod.ie
 10:42pm  up 72 days,  1:10,  0 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.00
Hobbiton.cod.ie
 10:38pm  up 72 days,  1:06,  1 user,  load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.00