[ale] Partially corrupt partition table, Mandrake 10.1

[William Bagwell]

(Short version)
One of the partition tables used by DrakeX is corrupt. 
"error while reading partition table in sector 207270630"

Is there an simple way to edit or delete just this one table? 

Comand line (fdisk -l) and the partition manager in Webmin both work but 
stop at 16 partitions. Apparently a hard limit and coincidentally the total 
before I made the mess described below. Need to do a SUSE install for a 
class I am taking and very reluctant to let an installer touch this until 
it is fixed.

(Long version)
A few weeks ago I was trying to install a second test / play install of 10.1 
on the (empty, and un-formatted) final 20 gigs of hda. Selected 
"Custom partitioning" the empty partition and then "Auto allocate". I have 
had mixed results with auto allocate in the past, though it has allways 
worked with *all* of the remaining space. Just not this time, and previous 
failures were more forgiving.

Original install (and Bloze) still booted, and I immediately made fresh back 
ups. Attempting to use the DrakeX through the control center returns this 
error.

>I can't read the partition table of device hda, it's too corrupted for me:(
>I can try to go on, erasing over bad partitions (ALL DATA will be lost!).
>The other solution is to not allow DrakeX to modify the partition table,
>(the error is extended partition: error while reading partition table in 
>sector 207270630.)

>Do you agree to lose all the partitions?

Sounds good until that last sentence. Selecting "No" gets an unusable tool 
showing the old partitions in the order created rather than the true order. 
(/user and /var were added last) It also shows the new partitions the other 
installer was trying to make plus a still empty one. Added together they 
total 2 extra gigs.

Searching on the first sentence of the error message (in quotes) returns 
only two useless hits. Google groups had 5 more, none in English. Will 
try to translate these if I get desperate. So far, more generic searches are 
returning far too many hits with nothing usefull on the first few pages.

Will continue trying to find "the magic search string", but if someone will 
throw me a bone I would appreciate it.
-- 
William (wait until the last minute) Bagwell