I did a stupid thing. I'll admit that right upfront. windows was a bit unstable.. so I reinstalled. now my linux installation doesn't boot, due to partition table problem.
Let me explain my setup: primary disk: /dev/hdb1 - small windows boot partition for windowsXP FAT32 /dev/hdb3 - / for mdk8.2 using ext3 /dev/hdb6 - /home for mdk 8.2 using ext3 secondary disk: /dev/hde1 - WindowsXP NTFS plus additional FAT32 windows storage partition. I didn't touch hdb1 in my re-install... and I wasn't thinking straight and trusted windows wouldn't do anything except drop a few files there, as it already existed. I re-installed windowsXP into hde1. Even reformated. trusting this wouldn't affect the other disk. Now when I boot into linux.. or try to.. I get kernel panic errors. If I try to put in the mdk8.2 installation disk it can't read the partition tables and wants to nuke them all. If I use partition magic 7 (on windows) it says: Disk 1 has partitions created using a different drive geometry. This serious problem can lead to data loss. The program then just shows that entire disk without any partition info, as it doesn't want me doing anything to it. I am guessing my partition table is a llittle hosed. Frankly I don't care about losing 99% of my linux installation. However I would like to recover some files from my /home directory, those being my very essential M.Sc project files. They are not backed up anywhere else that places on my linux partition... after all I trusted their safety there more than on windows... I wasn't counting on windows being sneaky enough to find them on my linux partition and nuke them.. let alone for it to nuke the whole lot. As I said... I did a stupid thing. Can anyone help me recover my essential files? Is there a way to 'fix' the partition table? Is there a way to boot anyway and get to my files? Heeeeelllppppp!!! -- many thanks Azrael
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
