Because you were not paying attention to partition sizes, you may need to use some sort of recovery tool. If you know exactly what your partition sizes were, you could use (c)fdisk again and create a new partition table that was exactly the same as your old one - and then your system *might* work again. This happened to me once a long time ago, and I was able to do exactly that - reboot, recreate the partition table in fdisk, reboot, and the system worked again. Having mucked up the partition table does not mean the data that was/would/is in the now undefined partitions is gone, it just means the computer has no reference for how to access it.
If you use a tool to look at the raw data on your drive, you might still see things, which is how a lot of serious data recovery programs work. But, it is at this point that I become fairly useless. I have not had to recover a working system disk that ran Linux - OS/2, Windows, and NeXTStep, yes, but for some reason I don't know how to handle this in Linux. I think the second-to-worst case would be that you had to run a data recovery program such as OnTrack. There is this tool, which I have not used, called TestDisk, which looks for partitions on the disk and compares against the partition table for inconsistencies, allowing you to pick which to use... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk The only encouragement I can give is that the most I have personally learned about computers in the shortest time is when I break something and have to fix it. Good luck! Nick -----Original Message----- From: Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts on behalf of David Sent: Wed 8/13/2008 3:48 PM To: [email protected] Subject: cfdisk and a live hdd So, I was going along repartitioning a new drive for a soon to be Gentoo install. While inside of my current Ubuntu machine, I used cfdisk, didn't pay attention to the partition sizes, and well I ended up partitioning the drive that my current Ubuntu system is on. This is a very "noobish" mistake, I know, but I figure there has to be a way to fix it. From what I understand, if I reboot the machine, it will probably not boot anymore because the partition table that it is used to, doesn't exist anymore, it is a totally different one. Thanks in advance for helping a "noob" out. -- I'd say the ultimate copy protection would be an awful, expensive product. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be working for the music industry... ~Some Genius From /. --- David McClellan
