Subject: Partition table gone after crash
To: None <netbsd-users@netbsd.org>
From: Benjamin Walkenhorst <Krylon@gmx.net>
List: port-i386
Date: 04/19/2004 07:58:35
Hello everybody,
Recently my NetBSD-server crashed. It is an Athlon 700 with 160MB of RAM, 18
and 80GB IDE HDD, an Adaptec 2940UW with a Plextor CD-ROM-drive attached,
running NetBSD 1.6.2_RC4. The machine serves as a DHCP-server, offers
xdmcp-broadcast and other things. But most importantly it was exporting some
shares on the 80GB-disk via NFS and Samba (2.2.5).
Now, as I said, the machine recently crashed. I noticed, because the machine
wasn't reacting to telnet-requests anymore (I know, telnet shouldn't be
used, but the machine is on a private network without any connection to the
internet). Since it only has a PS/2-port for the keyboard and shouldn't plug
that in while the machine is running, I turned the machine off and attached
a keyboard plus monitor and booted again. The machine brought me to
single-user mode, asking me to fsck the filesystems manually.
I did so, shut the machine down and removed keyboard and monitor. I booted
again, but after some time, the machine was still not responding. So I
attached the monitor again to see what was wrong.
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. ;-(
That is really bad, because I've been pretty lazy regarding backups in the
recent months.
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.
Unfortunately, I did not back up the disklabel, either... ;-/
So is there any way to recover the lost data? To somehow restore the
partition table (there was just one primary partition on the disk, covering
the entire disk and containing the disklabel)? I think there just *has* to
be some kind of program to read the disk thoroughly and... like, tell me,
where the partition boundaries are (partitions? slices? I mean those inside
the disklabel, the ones NetBSD uses).
Loosing all that data would really give me a bad week...
Thank you very much for your help,
Kind regards,
Benjamin
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