mysterious partition deletion

[Michael V. De Palatis]

On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 12:04:07AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Sunday 11 June 2006 22:50, Michael V. De Palatis wrote:
> > List,
> >
> > I was trying to get windows reinstalled for a dual boot so that I
> > can play games (I had no luck with wine, unfortunately). When I got
> > to the windows installer, it only showed one partition for some
> > reason on one of my disks, and sure enough, booting back into
> > Ubuntu, it seems that the other three got erased somehow!
> >
> > I didn't ever tell it to erase anything, so I'm very confused as to
> > what happened. Is there any chance that I can recover some of this
> > data, and if so how?
> 
> Becuase you say "one of my disks" I'm assuming that it isn't your main 
> disk where Windows is loaded. If this is true, and if nothing on 
> those disks is required for Windows, you could try using fdisk and 
> recreate the partitons exactly as they were - same start positions, 
> same sizes. If the contents of the partitions weren't changed 
> meanwhile, the data should all still be there.

In fact, it was the first drive that the windows (and other)
partitions were on, but this was separate from the Linux drive
entirely. I have been messing around with a hex editor, and it seems
that the contents are all still intact (as far as I can tell), but it
seems that the partition table is no longer there.

I would certainly like to be able to recreate the partitions, but
unfortunately, I did not ever have a record of where these start
positions were. Needless to say, from now on I will be documenting
this very information.

I'll keep everyone posted with what I've done in case it's of any use
to anyone else. I am also documenting it on my blog (
http://mike.polycat.net ) in order that others can hopefully gain
useful insight on this.

Mike