Disk /dev/hde doesn't contain a valid partition table {Scanned}

[Reuben D. Budiardja]

On Tuesday 07 September 2004 01:23, SW wrote:
> Hi Geoff,

> I ran fdisk /dev/hde and now it tells me:
>
>  fdisk /dev/hde
> Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF
> disklabel
> <snip>
> Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by
> w(rite)

Then this mean that somehow you don't have any partition in the drive.

>
> I'm not sure what this means, but if I select the 'w' option, will this
> destroy my data on this drive? 

Yes, but from what you told us from the output of fdisk, your data is probably 
not retrievable or already anyway, at least recovering it is not going to be 
easy.

> Also if I try to do the print option in
> fdisk, it doesn't show the ext3 partition I created:
...
> Could my problem be
> that I ran a program which screwed up my partition table? I ran parted
> which told me to run e2fsck due to a problem and then I ran fsck.ext3. Can
> any of these programs destroy my partitions?

Probably..

> What should I do now?

Assuming you can afford loosing the data there (for good), I'd just start 
over. Here is a step by step guide to create ext3 partition.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.3-Manual/ref-guide/s1-filesystem-ext3-create.html


RDB
-- 
Reuben D. Budiardja
Dept. Physics and Astronomy
University of Tennesse, Knoxville, TN

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