fdisk corrupted pdisk

[zozo]

Hello,

I have a french (AZERTY) B&W G3 with yaboot, Macos 9, debian and SuSE and wanted to install gentoo.

In the installation of gentoo, I made fdisk (instead of pdisk, I never remember)
and since it didn't show what I was used to, I excited but "q" is "z" and not "q", so I typed "z" but it's "w" so it wrote the partition table, without asking to confirm (who is the §&@#ù%§ of an é&%$$*£ that wrote this §X>>x+@##& program ?)

So fdisk corrupted my partition table.

SuSE has a rescue CD that boots a live system, so after making pdisk again, yaboot boots again, finds all my kernels and even the root image of the gentoo install, but then (both in SuSE and debian) the kernel panics that it doesn't find the root partition.

MacOS 9 won't boot either (looks forever for a startup folder).

fsck says that "the superblock couldn't be read, ... try
e2fsck -b 8193 <device> "

wich gives the same answer. tried with 16385 and 24577 also. tried "mke2fs -S <device>" also, says
"device size reported to be zero. bla bla bla fdisk"

so I tried fdisk again, wich says this shouldn't be used with other OSs (&@###%``£‰ßÝ¥** !!!!) and reads 0 everywhere !!!

pdisk however finds all my partitions, rewrites the map entry but that doesn't change: yaboot boots, finds all kernels, but not the root filesystems. I tried to boot OF and give the PATHs by hand, same result.

What can I do ?
How can I force the map ?
Obviously, the data is still there, but not readable.
Can I give the adresses in some other format ?
What does fdisk compared to pdisk ?
How can I format a partition (and not the entire disk) ? (mke2fs says "device size reported to be 0")

Can anybody help ?
(beside the obvious : "you shouldn't install 4 OSs")

Thank-you

Zoltan

[dingo]

A Very dangerous mess you've gotten yourself into. I was bummed to see such weak partitioning tools for the Mac, The only suggestion i could give is if you can create the *exact same* (the difficult part) partitions as you had in the first place in mac-fdisk/pdisk, and basicly write superblocks back where they should be, you could theoretically repair your filesystems.

I did something simular, trying to delete my mac OSX partition and create two out of one _after_ the linux install: the disk utility deleted my gentoo partition in the process. I just started all over and lost everything, very depressing. Mac OSX lost 2gb as its punishment

[zozo]

Thank you for your answer.

It happens that a solution came by miracle without loosing anything :
I managed after lots of OF-tweeking to boot a MacOS 9 CD (that I burned from an iBook) with DiskTools on it, and DiskTools repaired the HD without complaining!

Well-done Apple ! I recommend DiskTools to everyone !

Zoltan