[Solved] Partition Table royally screwed! Help!

[kLy]

Hi,

I was running WindowsXP and had the following partitions:

hda1 WinXP - NTFS
hda5 Shared vfat

I then used partition magic 8.0 to resize the partitions to make some space in the extended partition:

hda1 WinXP - NTFS
-- Space --
hda5 Shared vfat

Then started installing Gentoo, created a swap and a root partition with fdisk (I know I didn't make a boot part but that's beside the point)

so I had:

hda1 WinXP - NTFS
hda6 Linux Swap
hda7 ReiserFS
hda5 Shared vfat

Strangely, the numbering was wrong so I looked at the extended options in fdisk and chose to correct the partition order so it ended up like this:

hda1 WinXP - NTFS
hda5 Linux Swap
hda6 ReiserFS
hda7 Shared vfat

Great. I didn't finish installing Gentoo since I couldn't get GRUB to install without a boot partition. (Can someone tell me how to do it without a boot partition?) So I decided I'd boot up Partition Magic and resize some partitions to make space for a boot partition.

But whoa! Both the "rescue" (DOS) and Windows versions of Part Magic say that the partition table is corrupt and then just quits!

Aaaah!

I can boot into windows no probs and it seems like the partitions are ok (even from the M$ disk manager) but Partition Magic will not run at all!!

I do need Partition Magic since I always use it to resize. Is the partition table truly messed? Or is it just in a state that Partition Magic doesn't recognise? And is there some way to fix it?

Please help!

Thanks a lot!

[kLy]

More info:

I'm running the AMD64 version of Gentoo 2004.4

fdisk still works now but trying cfdisk produces: "FATAL ERROR: Bad logical partition 6 enlarged logical partitions overlap"

I take it there's definitely sometime wrong with the partition table then, and not just incompatibility with Partition Magic.

Thanks

[kLy]

This is the output from fdisk -l /dev/hda

[Sith_Happens]

Not sure if this will help, but the normal id for an extended partition is 5, where as the id for your extended partition is f, for W95 Ext'd. Perhaps a W95 extended partition cannot house a reiserfs or linux swap partition type. I'm not sure if that is the problem, and I'm not sure if you can simply change the id of the extended partition, but that might explain why some programs are having a hard time reading the partition table, and why some think that the reiser partition is overlapping with another extended partition. I would hope at this point that you had backed up the data you have saved on the vfat partition, because fiddling around with the partition table on a non-empty drive can cause data loss. If you do have your data backed up, or have some way of doing so, I would simply suggest that you get rid of all the extended partitons and start again from scratch (leaving your NTFS partition alone of course). As far as installing linux without a boot partition, that is as far as I know impossible. There needs to be some bootable partition on which GRUB and the kernel are installed, and which is marked as bootable in the MBR.
_________________
"That question was less stupid; though you asked it in a profoundly stupid way."
I'm the brains behind Jackass! | Tutorials: Shorewall

[cyrillic]

[Sith_Happens]

I stand corrected. Like I said, I wasn't sure.
_________________
"That question was less stupid; though you asked it in a profoundly stupid way."
I'm the brains behind Jackass! | Tutorials: Shorewall

[kLy]

Hi,

I killed both linux partitions and restarted the whole install process but this time using cfdisk. And all is working great

Why the hell does gentoo prefer fdisk as the default?

[kimchi_sg]

[kLy]

alrighty