Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 10:12:28 -0500 From: hawk2@hawkins.cba.uni.edu To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: finding my UFS partition (trashed partition table) Message-ID: <m12sRyR-0010dLC@hawkins.cba.uni.edu>
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I'm getting closer on this troublesome drive. The background follows, but the big question is: How do I figure out where my FreeBSD partition started and ended after the partition table gets thwacked? I know there is a "findsuper" command for ext2 filesystems, but what can I do from the fixit floppy? It appears that something thwacked my partition table. (Why is it always *my* partition table? Bit by bit, I'm becoming the world's expert on recovering them for both FreeBSD and Linux . . . [hmm, and DR-DOS, too]). Anyway, the disk was probably initially partitioned with the FreeBSD installation disks. Given the size of the first partition (linux rescue partition), I probably told it 64Mb. The second is a dos partition for the kids' stuff (OK, and Master of Orion :) at ~128MB. The third is a 4GB UFS slice, and the rest is a dos extended partition. Once the table was thwacked, windows would still boot. The freebsd loader could also launch lilo for linux, and get to the bootloader. Both FreeBSD and Linux would fail (timeout and panic, respectively) when trying to mount the root partition--apparently the first time either uses the partition table. Unfortunately, I"ve now overwritten the freebsd loader with lilo (I now realize this was foolish, but it's done :( ). I have managed to use Tom's Unix on a Floppy (great stuff; keep a copy around) to delete the tables for the first two partitions (linux and dos), and recreate the first partition in the correct size. I am in the correct range for the dos partition, and it should start at the right location, but now it gets as far as "starting MSDOS" and hangs. The big catch is that I *can't* use the fdisk from the installation/fixit disks, as they (like cfdisk under linux) are unable to find the drive due to the errors :( What I do have available for repairs are the installation disks, Tom's Unix, and debian 2.0 rick To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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