[K12OSN] corrupt partition table

[Julius Szelagiewicz]

On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Petre Scheie wrote:

> 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,
	the actual partitions are handled the same way with or without
LVM. The difficulty comes with the fact that afaik vgimport doesn't
restore the physical partitions. I wasn't very successful restoring
corrupt partition tables but this may have to do with the fact that
usually the damage was not confined to partition tables. Problem with
fdisk is that you -have- to put the new partion table -exactly- as the old
one, otherwise the data goes away.
julius