More on "Unreadable" Partition Tables

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 02:06:47PM -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 08:25:29PM +0300, cornel panceac wrote:
> > 2008/10/11 Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX N2469R <caf at omen.com>
> > 
> > > Here is the fdisk printout for the "offending" partition table.
> > > The MBR boots to sda8 (openSUSE).
> > >
> > > Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
> > > 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
> > > Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> > > Disk identifier: 0xe4c0e4c0
> > >
> > >  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> > > /dev/sda1   *           1        6374    51199123+   7  HPFS/NTFS
> > > /dev/sda2            6375        6505     1052257+  83  Linux
> > > /dev/sda3            6506       24379   143572905    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
> > > /dev/sda4           19259       21808    20482875   83  Linux
> > > /dev/sda5            6506        6897     3148708+  82  Linux swap /
> > > Solaris
> > > /dev/sda6            6898        9508    20972826   83  Linux
> > > /dev/sda7            9509       11941    19543041   83  Linux
> > > /dev/sda8           11942       15588    29294496   83  Linux
> > > /dev/sda9           15589       18020    19535008+  83  Linux
> > > /dev/sda10          18021       19258     9944203+  83  Linux
> > > /dev/sda11          21809       24379    20651526   83  Linux
> >
> > you have a primary partition over an extended?
> 
> Yes, this looks like a broken partition table with overlapping 
> partitions.

Not necessarily.  /dev/sda4 sits between sda10 and sda11 but
/dev/sda3 is extended.  Things are out of order and that may be
not to liking of some tools.

> This might 
> be fixable by moving sda4 to the extended partition, in which case it 
> would become sda11 and sda11 would become sda12, but it may be tricky 
> to do it.

Nah!  This shold be very simple to do.  Redirect an output
of 'sfdisk -d /dev/sda' to a file, edit results to put that
into an order and feed that to sfdisk back.  This should be it.
Rewrites of partition tables do not touch file systems although
fstab may need some fixups depending on how it was done.

Keep a copy of an original ouput from 'sfdisk -d /dev/sda'
(or even better an image of the current partition table too)
in case you messed something and you need to restore
the current state.

   Michal