On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 10:34:39PM -0400, Gregory Avedissian wrote:
That was linux fdisk I was talking about. It only shows the windows partition. sfdisk -l shows four partitions - one windows, and three empty ones, with no start or end cylinders. I'm not sure what that's about.
There are always 4 primary partition entries in the partition table in first sector of the drive (MBR). The unused ones are filled with zeros.
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?
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). What happened to make Windows take over the entire disk? Are you sure /dev/hdb is still /dev/hdb, and didn't change due to a disk failure or recabling of the IDE bus? Is Windows 98 installed to /dev/hdb1? It is highly unusual to have Windows boot from anything other than /dev/hdaN.