Hi,
In upgrading my Dell Precision 410 workstation from RH 7.2 to FC2, my primary SCSI hard disk was corrupted.
The corrupted disk, /dev/sda, had 2 or 3 FAT32 partitions and one ext3 partition, I believe. The FAT32 held Win2K, and the other was a Linux partition.
I don't really care about the FAT32 partitions, but I'd like to get the data from the linux partition. I don't think it is corrupted at all, but the partition table, the MBR, and early cylinders are. The linux partition holds about 3.1 GB of data.
I'm hoping that I can copy that data via ftp to another machine that has space. Then, I could just do a low-level format of the drive and try again. After much searching, though, I still haven't figured out how to get to this data. Any ideas?
More background:
I tried first to do an upgrade, but ran into disk space problems. Most of my Linux install on this machine is on a second drive, including the /boot partition. That second drive seems to be just fine.
So, I decided to just install FC2 over Win2k and forget about the dual-boot. I chose to do a manual partition to preserve all the Linux partitions and move the /boot and GRUB to the first drive. I got some warning messages, but the messages also said that it would only be a problem for older boot loaders. Thus, I forged ahead, creating a /boot partition, a / partition, and a /usr/local partition out of the old Windows ones. All were ext3.
After choosing the packages and beginning the install, the installation stopped and exited abnormally. The partition table had been rewritten, but I'm not sure how much further it got. I tried to install again and re-partition, but it wouldn't let me.
Then, I re-booted into linux rescue mode and tried to partition the drive using fdisk. Big mistake. After leaving fdisk telling it to write (w) the partition table, I then triend to look at it again to make sure the partition table was correct. Now, what I get is:
Unable to read /dev/sda
I do sfdisk -l /dev/sda and get:
130 cylinders instead of 1110 read: input/output error cannot read sector 0 unrecognized partition No partitions found
I've tried gpart, but it fails with the error "cannot get sector size on dev(/dev/sda)" even when I give it the geometry using -C 1110,255,63
I should be able to boot into RH7.2, once I figure out how to make the second disk the first disk. I have to read up on that, but if anybody knows off the top of their head, thanks!
Thanks!
Kurt Hansen khansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
