[ale] Partially corrupt partition table, Mandrake 10.1

[Joe Steele]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, William Bagwell wrote:

> Knoppix (3.7) shows them with fdisk -l. (Have not yet run your full script 
> from Knoppix as it locked my "Documents" files for some reason...)
> 

Whenever you access a hard disk in Knoppix (e.g., clicking on "hard disk
partition [hda1]" on the desktop), Knoppix mounts the disk read-only.  One
way of changing this to read-write is by right clicking on the partition
and choosing "actions -> change read/write mode". 

> Also discovered they show up in /dev as block devices. With fresh back-ups 
> would this be a convenient place to try to delete them?
> 

If you are suggesting keeping your existing partitions but wipe out all
the data in them by reformatting them (e.g., mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda19),
then yes, you could do that. 

On, the other hand, if you are suggesting, for example, "rm /dev/hda19",
the answer is no. That would not delete the partition;  It would only
remove the block-special file "hda19" from /dev/.  (And if this were done
by accident, then it's a simple matter of using mknod, chown, and chmod to
recreate the file.  In fact, you can create devices for partitions that
don't even exist -- mknod /dev/hda63 b 3 63.  But any attempt to mount the
newly created device would obviously fail because the partition doesn't
actually exist.) 

> 
> root at ttyp1[knoppix]# fdisk -l
> 
> Disk /dev/hda: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
> 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1   *           1         510     4096543+   b  W95 FAT32
> /dev/hda2             511       14665   113700037+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
> /dev/hda5             511        1275     6144831    b  W95 FAT32
> /dev/hda6            1276        1320      356800+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda7            3841        3959      951016+  82  Linux swap
> /dev/hda8            3959        5201     9973624+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda9            5201        7695    20031448+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda10           1320        1434      919957+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda11           2059        2189     1044256+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda12           2189        3841    13269784+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda13           7695        8824     9067432+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda14           8825       11998    25495123+   b  W95 FAT32
> /dev/hda15           1435        1535      811251   82  Linux swap
> /dev/hda16           1536        2058     4200966   83  Linux
> /dev/hda17          11999       12762     6136798+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda18          12763       12902     1124518+  82  Linux swap
> /dev/hda19          12903       14665    14161266   83  Linux
> 
> Partition table entries are not in disk order
> 
> 

Progress!  From this it looks like the disk space is pretty much fully
allocated to partitions. 

Your first posting of this thread mentioned DrakeX saying "error while
reading partition table in sector 207270630".  By my calculations, the
error is referring to the partition table at the beginning of /dev/hda19. 
Since fdisk isn't complaining about this partition here, I wonder if
possibly DrakeX just isn't up to the task (just like your first version of
fdisk wasn't up to the task of handling 16+ partitions). 

I'm not sure what exactly you want to do next, but it looks as though this
version of fdisk could be useful in achieving your goal. 

--Joe