[K12OSN] corrupt partition table

[Petre Scheie]

The power went out yesterday, and so my server went down.  When the power came back on, 
the server tried to boot, but failed apparently because the partition table got 
corrupted--it just spits out a 'Insert boot disk' error.  I booted from Knoppix and it 
was during that bootup that I saw the message about the partition table being bad.  Once 
Knoppix is up, it doesn't show any hard drive partitions on its desktop, so that pretty 
much confirms it.  Is there any way to deal with a trashed partition table?  I figure 
I'll have to reformat and re-install, which is okay--a reason to upgrade from the 
K12LTSP version 3.1.2 that was on there.  But there are a few files I'd like to retrieve 
beforehand if possible.  Complicating the situation is that it was using LVM, although 
I'm not certain it was used for the root partition; unfortunately, I can't remember how 
it was layed out.  But I think using LVM changes the way partitions are handled.  Are 
there any tools for dealing with crippled LVM systems?

Petre