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[Li2727] Partition Table (help needed)

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[Li2727] Partition Table (help needed)

Postby MDS » Sat Oct 11, 2008 9:06 am

http://forum.fujitsu-siemens.com/forum/ ... 89&t=34152

Hello everyone,

While I was happy with my Vista - Linux dualboot system, I thought, why don't I install XP to finish it off.
I slipstreamed SATA driver into disc, made all preparations, ...
During first installation the installer gave me errors - and the installation couldn't be completed. I rebooted and was planning to burn another disc until I discovered that I couldn't boot because my whole partition table was deleted! I managed somehow to boot into Vista and restore it with Partition Table Doctor. I burned another disc, and tried again.
The second time the installation was succesful, atleast till the part where you reboot. After the reboot nothing happened and again; MY WHOLE PARTITION TABLE WAS DELETED. This time I am not able to boot into anything; my whole system is seriously ****** up.
I made a call to some family members of me, who have studied ICT at university and one of them suggested me to rebuild my partition table using fdisk. As I have a custom partition table, I won't be able to do this (I have 7 partitions), but atleast I'll be able to restore my recovery partition (as it has the same size on all Amilo Li2727 laptops) and thus get my laptop back to factory state (which I am not able to do now as I can't boot this partition and unfortunately :( I haven't created my recovery discs yet). I could order those discs but €40 is a lot for a 14 year old boy (who has been experimenting too much)...
What I am asking; ANYONE, that has a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li2727 with an intact recovery partition, to fire up their favourite partitioning tool and tell me the EXACT size of the first (recovery) partition.
When I partially rebuild the partitioning table then I can atleast get it back to a usable factory state. I'll still lose my data (which is important, but not really that important). I might try to recover my data with rdisk though.
Ofcourse, any other ideas to rescue my laptop & data are welcome.
Please help me asap, as I really need my computer for school and write my new programs.

(Oh, and I know that I've been stupid, experimenting without a backup of data/mbr/partition table. You just think it will never happen to you, until it strikes you.)

Any help is seriously appreciated!

MDS
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Re: [Li2727] Partition Table (help needed)

Postby hikaru » Sat Oct 11, 2008 8:36 pm

If it's really only the MBR and the partition table that is messed up you should be able to recover all your installed operating systems and all data. But even if you can recover the recovery partition itself, to my experience you won't be able to recover its functionality.

I think the Super Grub Disk should do this:
http://www.supergrubdisk.org/
I haven't tested it up to now, but I think I will take the chance next week and post some results if you still need help.

Edit:
Maybe this is helpful too (even if you use another distribution):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351
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Re: [Li2727] Partition Table (help needed)

Postby MDS » Sat Oct 11, 2008 10:21 pm

Thanks for the help, but I've already formatted my whole harddisk again.
Starting of with a fresh install isn't that bad, and I've been able to recover most of my data.
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Re: [Li2727] Partition Table (help needed)

Postby hikaru » Sun Oct 12, 2008 9:56 am

So I guess you will have to live without Vista now? ;-)

For the future, this is how to save your MBR and partition table with linux as root (assuming that it is on the first HDD and you have a USB-stick plugged in):
Code: Select all
dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/USBSTICK/SOMEFILE bs=512 count=1

To restore it just call this command:
Code: Select all
dd if=/media/USBSTICK/SOMEFILE of=/dev/sda
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