[OT] Maxtor ate my partition table

[Robert]

John Wendel wrote:
> Just wanted to post a little cautionary tale.
> 
> Got new Maxtor disk. Installed as hda. Stupidly, decided to use Maxtor 
> software to partition disk. During the install, it complained that hdb 
> (Western digital) was formatted with an incompatible disk overlay, and 
> offered to "fix" it. Fool that I am, I said OK. Started to partition the new 
> disk and noticed that it wanted to install some sort of crap disk overlay, so 
> I cancelled the operation.
> 
> At this point, I tried to boot from hdb and got the nice "NO PARTITION TABLE" 
> message. Thanks a lot Maxtor!!! Of course, I didn't have a record of the 
> partition table to restore from.
> 
> So, after a lot of googling and reading some nice web sites, I booted a 
> KNOPPIX cd and ran testdisk. It quickly (and correctly) discovered the old 
> partition structure and rebuilt the table.
> 
> Lessons learned:
> 
> Don't use disk vendor software to partition a disk.
> Keep a record of your partition tables.
> Knoppix is a great rescue system.
> "testdisk" is a great piece of code.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> John
> 
> 

OT or not, thanks for posting. I ended up recovering an old Win95 drive 
that was partitioned into 5 drives until &^%$# MaxBlast worked its 
special brand of magic several years ago. All 5 drives are mounted and 
totally readable at this moment on another linux box on my humble 
network, awaiting transfer to another drive.
I'm stuck on exporting via NFS but that's another question for another 
post if I can't get the details worked out this morning.