> And guess what, the disklabel on the second disk (the 80GB-drive
> with all the important data), it was just gone. Even worse, fdisk
> shows me an empty partition table. ;-(

> But I can't help thinking that my precious data must still be on
> that hard-drive. After all, it's not the data that's corrupted
> (or at least I hope it isn't), but the partition table, and possibly
> the disklabel.

This has happened to me too.  Since you had such a simple disk
layout, it really should not be much of a problem.  What I'd do is
to just try and recreate the partition and keep my fingers crossed.
Of course, I have done exactly that in the past and I corrupted the
disk even worse.

So what *you* should do is to pop in a big disk (like 120GB) with
room for an image of your 80GB disk, make an image (dd should work),
configure the image as a disk (vnconfig) and try the partitioning /
disklabeling trick.  If that works, which it should, and you are
*absolutely* sure you know how you did it, try it on the actual
disk.  And *keep* the image, so that if that "live" operation fails,
you can at least copy the files from the image (to your now freshly
reformatted disk).

And then you should make backups of the disklabels and partition
tables of all disks.

Oh, and I didn't sleep tonight, so look for other advice / flames /
corrections before touching anything.  :-)

And readonly mounts would seem to be a good idea too.


Good luck,
Magnus


-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - A no graphics, no pop-ups email service