> I am happy to be corrected, but that's what I'd do. i.e. remove linux's > partitions and re-install if that's in any way practical.
I mostly agree. The partition table needs to be fixed up, the only way to change partition entries is to delete them first, then to recreate them. There is no need to back up any data before doing this, if you recreate a partition which is wrong, just change it back. For testing whether a partition might be correctly created in the parition table, mount it read-only. If it doesn't barf, you're go. If it barfs, probably the partition boundaries don't correlate with the file system, or (less likely) the filesystem is corrupted, e.g. missing superblock. A corrupted filesystem needs to be fsck'ed, there's a minor risk this does it in completely. Obviously, before doing this you send fdisk -l to the printer. Even more obviously, you are just experiencing first-hand what "back up your partition table" means, and what happens if you don't. A while back I sternly told a friend to back it up, a few months later, he comes and says you know, you were right - I just spent 2 days finding the files I really needed. Be very careful with off-by-one errors, some fdisk programs start counting at 1, some at 0. There's no need with any fancy purpose-built rescue tom's bla bla stuff (unless you don't have a cdrom drive). Distros have a bootable rescue system on their CDs. SuSE has a good one, RH has a crappy one, and Knoppix has one too - of course one can say Knoppix *is* a rescue system... ;) Booting one of these will make your life much easier than booting some whatever from a floppy. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
