On Monday 08 February 2010 02:25:17 Nikos Chantziaras wrote: > b) You have a corrupted partition table that you can try to repair > with the "testdisk" tool (after you make a full backup of your > disk.)
That seems to have been it. Testdisk did indeed write a new partition table, minus one of the partitions which it insisted on deleting so I suppose something was wrong with it. After much time taking and restoring backups my main system is now running again and i can run fdisk. I'm surprised at this, because a seek error sounds uncomfortably like a hardware problem to me. Maybe some particular error in the partition table confused fdisk and cfdisk. Anyway, thanks for the help, Nikos and all those who offered it. -- Rgds Peter.
