Help recovering damaged partition

[matheusleite]

Hello,

In my disk I had an extended partition and a logical partition within it, more or less like this:

Device Start End Id System
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/sda1 2000 35003 85 Linux extended
/dev/sda5 5224 35003 83 Linux

Note that the sda1 partition was empty from cylinders 2000 to 5223. Then, I decided to remove the empty space by shrinking sda1, using Yast's partitioning tool to edit its start cylinder:

Device Start End Id System
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/sda1 5224 35003 85 Linux extended
/dev/sda5 5224 35003 83 Linux

After I did this, sda5 became unusable. When I try to mount sda5, the partitioning tool now says "it is not allowed to assign a mount point to a device with nonexistent or unknown filesystem".

Please, can someone try to explain what happened? What directions should I take to repair the partition?

Thanks in advance,

Matheus

[oz]

You could check out your partition table using TestDisk. It comes with the Parted Magic LiveCD, and there are good instructions for using it on their website:

Parted Magic

[matheusleite]

I used TestDisk but it didn't help much. When I ran its test, it didn't even list sda5, although fdisk does.

The problem is that I don't know that much about partitions and I am afraid of doing something that might completely destroy the unaccessible partition. So I was wondering if someone could explain what I did wrong, and how to fix it.

[devils casper]

Run Testdisk 3-4 times continuously. It will recover correct partition table.