On Sat, 17 Apr 2004, Bill Barnes wrote:
> Just "rebuilt my PC" - actually relocated guts to new case and power supply.
>
> Inadvertently re-attached PATA drive to Raid ide mobo connector. For some
> reason, although WinXP ran (sort of) drive shat itself, corrupted Grub and
> apparently changed linux partition type (from ext3 - type 83).
>
> Can see partitions OK, all appear to be correct size etc, but when I run
> Fedora CD it does not see the ext3 partition. Knoppix 3.3 does see the
> partition but advises "could not determine filesystem type, and none was
> specified".
>
> Can I use Fips or FDisk to "correct" the partition type? or is there any other
> way to access the partition?
DO NOT USE ANYTHING THAT RESIZES THE PARTITONS.
Actually... before you go on with the rest of this, check the drive in the
old system and note what disk geometry it has according to the bios and
also according to /proc/ide/hdX/geometry. When placed in the new system it
should be the same geometry. I've had different BIOS & settings affect the
way it's detected. It may be necessary to set manually - at least to get
GRUB loaded. From there grub can hand the kernel suitable settings...(eg
"hdc=1050,32,64" which is cyl,heads,sectors from kernel source
Documentation/ide.txt)
The fdisk program can quite easily change the partition type without
affecting the content of the partition. However, it seems likely that
there may be other corruption. Take the approach of copying first then
fiddling.
If you have another disk that's large enough use dd to copy one disk to
the other partitions & all. This would be best done overnight.
If not, use dd to copy the suspect partition to a file on another working
partition (any linux readable filesystem).
Once you've backed up the mess, you can try your luck with e2fsck and
hopefully that'll repair the partition. If it can't find a superblock
you'll need to specify another one - find out where they might be with
mke2fs -n /dev/hdXN which will simulate a format and tell you where the
superblocks will go.
Finally... assuming you get something semi-sensible out of the repaired
partition backup the files you can find (and want) to somewhere else and
perhaps rerun mke2fs to start with a clean filesystem.
--
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