On Thu, 2006-28-09 at 11:14 +0200, Wolfgang Illmeyer wrote: > Hi, > > Have a look at sys-block/gpart, it can probably help you.
Yes, I discovered gpart last night. It can be a useful tool for partition problems, although in this case it has turned out that testdisk was what I needed. gpart doesn't deal with logical partitions very well. It took hours for it to find my old partitions and even then it is left to you to do some quite gruesome arithmetic to work out where the start of your partition actually is. I just couldn't recreate a valid partition that way. testdisk on the other hand immediately identified all the deleted partitions and I only needed to select one button to write them back to the partition map. After opening and saving them again in fdisk to make the kernel aware of the changes I had my files back again. However if you have changed anything on your disk apart from the partition map you will need to use gpart and may the gods have mercy on your soul. > In your other thread you mentioned you had no space for backing up a > partition. Too bad I didn't have the idea earlier, but you could create > a "copy on write" partiton, for example with network block devices (needs > kernel support and sys-block/nbd) or sys-fs/cowloop. This way, you could > rescue any data, without touching your original partition and you have no > need to backup the whole partition. Never heard of this before. Will have to look into it. Could never work out a good backup strategy, which is why I got in this mess. I'll probably give gentoo a rest for now after all this. Try a live CD for while--musix or dynebolic or something--see how I get on and decide from there. I've learned a lot using gentoo but it's getting very time consuming maintaining everything. After installing Ubuntu Dapper on a couple of other machines my expecations of a Linux distro have become a lot more demanding. I don't need to do everything. What I need most is for music and video stuff to work without a lot of maintenance. Let someone else with more sense than I am ever likely to have choose the CFLAGS because my builds of rosegarden and whatnot are far too unstable. But as I've said before, one thing that gentoo really has going for it is a patient and knowledgeable user base. I've found the ubuntu community to be very welcoming too, although generally it lacks the accumulation of experience with hard problems that marks gentoo users out. Robert Robert -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
