I just want to point out that altering partition tables, on other peoples machines mind you, is VERY dangerous. It may be a good thing to have a disclaimer and perhaps even an acknowledgment signed by people who bring machines to instaparties to get installs done. Even commercial products (ie. Partition Magic) can screw up at times. You have been warned by something other than the software company.
And with that, a Linux Saves the Day story: Once upon a time I was repartitioning a windoze machine with partition magic. Something went wrong and after that dos/windoze would not boot if that hard disk was in the machine. This means that not even PM's rescue disks would boot, because they're dos based. The boot process stopped when the HD was first accessed, and would continue to be accessed "forever". What happened is similar to the Robin Hood and Friar Tuck problem. Walking the EPBR chain resulted in an endless loop, which dos failed to check. In other words, extended partition hda4 had hda5's address for it's second entry, and hda5 had hda4's address as it's second entry, when it should have been hda6's address. I then booted Linux to see if I could fix it. Linux read through the extended partition loop but thankfully it stopped at hda63 (?or is it hda64). Fdisk was no help since it read the loop too, so I hacked the partition table by hand and wrote it back to disk, but at that point I had lost about 4 partitions that had existed after the second one. Not wanting to lose the data I had spent the last few hours generating, so I went on a search. By looking at the beginning of every cylinder on the disk using 'file' I was able to identify where the remaining extended partitions started so I could put the correct pointer back into hda5 (hda7 and beyond still had correct partition tables but it wouldn't be difficult to correct those too, only time consuming). Note: I told this war story in hope that you'll get something out of it. It is possible to recover a lost partition table!, and without too much effort, given the proper knowledge. -Cedar ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
