[clug] Accidental commit to fdisk - rebuild (partitions still mounted)

[Adam Thomas]

2009/7/20 Neil Symons <neil.symons at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
>
> I hope there is a simple answer to this.
>
> I am helping out someone who accidentally removed an extended partition
> using fdisk on Suse linux 9 (86/64 sp3) and lost more partitions than
> expected.

I had a similar moment when I attached a SATA drive to a RAID controller
and told the controller to export the drive as (what I thought was) a single
disk. The controller warned me that it was going to write the changes to
the disk but, being the fool I am, thought it meant it was going to write
the changes to an eeprom. On booting the machine I discovered that the
controller's setup had hosed the partition table on each of the 4 drives.

I put the disks back on the machines generic SATA controller and checked
out the damage. None of the partitions were found so I was in panic stations
at this point.

I pulled down a copy of SystemRescueCD[0] and used TestDisk[1] to
find the Linux MD partitions and re-write the partition tables. All was
well after that.

[0] http://www.sysresccd.org/
[1] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

> The system is up with all partitions still mounted. The risk is, if he
> reboots or unmounts any partition the data may be lost forever.

SuSE may have TestDisk in it's repos, otherwise try the source package.
Rebooting may not be as big a drama as you might expect because
TestDisk can scan the device for the file system markers and restore
the partition table using those.

>
> I do not know how to obtain the current partition information on the drive
> to rebuild using fdisk.
> Help would be extremely appreciated here.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Neil
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