slacker22

Im hoping somebody can help me with this. I was trying to salvage my windows partition while installing gentoo and I guess the partition tables got messed up. Heres what happened.. I had a 60 gig drive with an ntfs c:\ drive and an ntfs d:\ drive. The d drive was at the end of the disk and contained my operating system. my c:\ drive was just a data drive and the active partition. I killed c:\ ( which also made windows unbootable come to find out.. windows is lame ) and then i placed 3 partitions in place of the c drive for gentoo. boot(ext2), root(reiserfs), swap. When I did this everything looked fine. However now that im in the system... things are a bit wierd. in cfdisk and fdisk, the partitions are flopped around. its wierd.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hda1 Boot Primary Linux ext2 74.03
hda3 Primary Linux 53998.97
hda4 Primary Linux swap 600.45
hda2 Primary NTFS 5346.44

the hda3 should be hda2, and the swap should be hda3. and the ntfs should be hda4. thats how it looked when i created them anyhow, and the ntfs is the last partition on the disk. the ntfs drive is corrupted. unrecognizable by windows, linux and disk utilities.

Now heres where it gets wierder. when i mount /dev/hda2 it doesnt try to mount the ntfs... it actually does mount the root fs. However... gentoo thinks the drive only has 5 gigs. instead of 53 gigs. when i do swapon /dev/hda3 it activates the swap! what the hell is going on. Ive given up hope on the ntfs partition. I would like to recover my docuemnts ( I should have backed it up anyways.. oh well. ) . What I would like to do at this point is just get my partitions displaying right and have all my disk space for root.

phew! Can anybody help? Am i doomed for a gentoo reinstall? I cant afford to do that... it took me forever to install and compile everything.

sarumont

If you can, get a copy of Knoppix. Boot this and see where the partitions are placed. It sounds like you deleted the NTFS partition and then created the other three? You *have* to reboot when you delete DOS partitions; I'm pretty sure that translates to NTFS and FAT32 parts, too. This sounds like it's what caused your troubles. If Knoppix (hell...you can use the Gentoo LiveCD if you're comfy with CLI) doesn't detect/mount your partitions in a useable way, I think you're in for a re-install.

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slacker22

You *have* to reboot when you delete DOS partition.
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Ahh well thats interesting to know.

sarumont

I'm pretty sure fdisk outputs this knowledge to stdout when you write a part table, but I'm not 100% on that...

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slacker22

Ive read it before.. I guess I was just too impatient to install gentoo that I didnt remember it. And I didnt think that it would muck up the table. I guess its because the kernel still has the old table loaded.

Im still using the system btw... works fine. Havent rebooted in a couple of days. Very stable. The only issue i have is lack of free space. 1 gig is enough for now, i already have openoffice installed and all my development tools I found this utility called DFSEE that can fix partitions but Im going to have a to do a bit of reading and find out what really happened and see if there is a way to fix it. I may pay for their support. Who knows maybe ill get my data back. All i know is im not reinstalling gentoo.....

Im amazed the system even works.

sarumont

Good to hear that it works. It'd be best if you could backup your stuff and move it onto a sane partition table but whatever works. Just don't do anything drastic to try to fix it without reading a lot/backing up important stuff.

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slacker22

its been ages since ive checked this thread. Ive moved on. But in case anybody is reading... if you decide to delete partitions using cfdisk.. probably a good idea to reboot before adding any new ones. Also be weary of windows... the c drive is treated as the system drive... even if the operating system is on another drive... it requires the c drive as system. It can be fixed though. Just dont do what i did and delete stuff without rebooting. It can cause havok.

Cheers.

PS... never recovered the data... turned out that the mappings of the root drive ended up being the linux root partition. So the few gigs that i was using was actually the drive i wanted to save! wierd.

Pas

Same problem here. Installing from gentoo 2006 LiveCD. Tried it 3 times with the different installations. If your partitions has been erased, use Acronis Recovery Tools (slow mode, that actually works much faster).
Seems gentoo don't like ntfs much...

So, my partition table is like that:
<FAT32 (Primary, active) 30 GB><NTFS(logical) 150 GB><Unallocated 15 GB>

With different installers I tried to create 100 MB ext2 (to /boot mountpoint) in unallocated space. But... Hm, it deleting my NTFS! (while fat stays untouched). Ok, tried to make partitions before install...

<FAT32><NTFS><EXT2><EXT3><SWAP>

Result is amazing... Partitioner shows 200 GB unallocated. Of course there wasn't any talk about mountpoints.

Who can explain, why it happens?

Srry 4 my bad english.