Broken disk partition -- please help

[Karl Larsen]

Sameera Shaakunthala wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Last week I was 'playing' (to experiment) with the grub-install and
> update-grub. And my stupid experiment damaged the dev/sda1
> I've lost my Windows boot partition. It's OK to lose Windows, but there were
> some of my university assignments and documents in that partition -- I
> really need it.
>
> /dev/sda1 - NTFS primary - C:\
> /dev/sda7 - linux-swap
> /dev/sda8 - ext3 - /
>
> gparted can recognize the partition as ntfs but can not calculate the free
> space
> ubuntu 8.04 can not mount the volume
> Windows boot cd recognizes the partition as an unformatted volume and asks
> to format it
>
> Will gpart help me? (I'm too scared to use it.)
> Please give me an idea of how do I,
> * recover the important files existing on /dev/sda1 ?
> or
> * restore the partition without losing existing data? (I think it's
> something with the MBR)
>
>
> I hate Windows, but I have to use it for some of my university assignments
> such as Visual Basic and C#.
>
>
> If somebody can kindly give me a solution, it will be a great help for the
> rest of my educational life.
> Thank you.
>
>
> * Sameera Shaakunthala
>
>
>
>
>   
    Concentrate on getting your windows back. Here are some steps to try 
if you have Ubuntu running.

1. In a terminal please type this into it: sudo fdisk /dev/sda and after 
you give your password it will come up wanting a command. The first 
command is p. This will print your partition table. If it shows a fine 
/dev/sda1 which I think it will, the next command is q.

2. If /dev/sda1 is fine then you want to use the Windows CD and select 
that you want to fix windows. Put in the CD-Rom and reboot. When it is 
up look for the way to fix your windows boot. It used to be you used 
FDISK -mbr but it is now different.

3. Your windows should come up without grub. Now save the things you 
need for school.


Karl


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
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