Lost Partition Table

[Che Cordes]

I am running RedHat 7.2 with 2 disk drives. The OS is running on an old 6GB drive and is still functioning correctly. I recently bought a new 60GB drive and added it to my system. I created three new partitions 4gb, 4gb, 25gb in that order (all formatted with ext3 filesystem).

As far as I can tell, I had a power outage and when the system came back up it wouldn't mount the file systems on the 60GB drive. I tried fsck and it asks if the partition is 0 bytes. I ran fdisk against the drive and it does not show any partitions.

I found an article that mentions the use of gpart to help recreate the partition table. Has anyone had success and or recommendations as to how I can recover the data on my disk drive? I do not have a backup of everything I need off this drive.

http://www.oz.net/~trav/linux/lost_partition.html

http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/

[I_M]

Hi,

Its too bad your disk lost partition table.
It is in First 512 byte of the disk. (First 0-445 is for bootloader, and 446 to 512 is for the partition data.)

So now we know which part of the disk you want to recover.

We assume your data is still on the disk surface, although you can not reach them. If they are important data, you buy one more exactly same disk and dd whole the data before you start to recovery.
I said "exactly same", this is an inportant point.
Because partition data depends on the disk mech.

Once you have duplicate the data on the new disk, you can do any "cut & try" on the copy disk.
So why don't you create exactly
same size partition on your new disk. I expect after exactly same partition data re-created by fdisk, your data may back.

Again, don't touch the original disk. And use exactly same disk.
otherwise, this recovery method has no meaning.

Good luck

[Che Cordes]

Thanks for the response. Last night, I tried the gpart utility and it was able to recognize the partitions that I had defined on the disk. I let gpart rewrite the partition table and it restored my disk to it's original state with very little effort! All three partitions were Primary ext3 partitions and all my data is still there.

Che'