Thanks, Charles. I was afraid that hdb designation would be confusing. That's just temporary, so I can do things to that drive from a working linux intall on another disk. I've got three drives within reach of the IDE cables, and I keep switching cables and jumpers to do all this. The disk in question is around 30GB, and originally, 6 GB were taken by windows on hda1, 1GB by swap on hda2, 8GB for hda3, and 10GB for hda5, leaving 3.7GB unallocated space in the extended partition. I did this by making the win partition with the win98 fdisk, and then making the linux partitions with the suse intall disk. It looks like the numbers aren't adding up right.
Disk /dev/hdb: 1123 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
That equals 18040995 sectors of 512 bytes/each = 9,236,989,440 bytes total.
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0
Taking the blocks as 1024 bytes, thats 9020497.5 blocks.
Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 0+ 1122 1123- 9020466 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
The Win95 partition is just about the entire disk, leaving only 31.5 1024-byte blocks left = 32,256 bytes. Where could any Linux partitions have fit?
On the other 24GB which appear not to be partitioned. I'm a little bothered by the math, though. You came up with 9GB, and I made that partition 6GB.
OK, one more idea. Can I use the partition tool to set the partitions again without formatting them, and then be able to access them?
If you are absolutely sure of the correct start/end of all the partitions on the disk, then yes, you should be able to re-set them in the partition table and regain access to the data without formatting them. This is much more likely to happen if there are no extended partitions (hdb5 or higher).
No, I'm not sure, just assuming that if I use the same partition tool with the same drive, it'll come up with the same numbers. Guess I need to double-check the size of my win partition and make sure it hasn't changed. In fact, I seem to recall noticing that hda1 ended well below cyl 1023 when I set it up. At 8225280 bytes/cylinder, 6GB should end at cyl 750, not 1125. The partition tool shows the end of hda1 at 1023, and the end of hda2 at 1154. Uh-oh. I better sleep on it before I do anything else. Maybe parted didn't work because I gave it the wrong numbers? Thanks, Greg