Civileme....yep, but of course I have no conclusive evidence
that the partition type was the culprit (Ron Stodden, in fact
believes that it's an ok, situation) but I sure will never allow
such a situation to occur again on one of my drives.
Alan
Civileme wrote:
>
> Alan Shoemaker wrote:
>
> > Hi all....I'm back to emailing on a Mandrake 6.1 system, and it
> > sure feels good!! The problem is it's a new install and I was
> > not able to recover any part of the old install's root
> > partition. It appeared to be totally hosed.
> >
> > However I do believe that I've discovered a probable cause.
> > When I originally set up for the installation I used PM4 to
> > create the partitions. I created an extended partition with
> > three linux partitions in it, two ext2 partitions and a linux
> > swap partition.
> >
> > But on the subsequent fdisk scans (after the corruption of the
> > partition table had occurred) I (finally) noticed that the
> > extended partitiion was a type f, instead of the proper type 5.
> > Type f is listed as 'Win95 Ext'd (LBA)', whereas a type 5 is
> > listed simply as 'Extended'.
> >
> > Anyway, I suspect that having 3 linux partitions inside a Win95
> > extended partition probably is what allowed my root partition to
> > get corrupted (I figure it was totally overwritten somehow, but
> > that's just a guess).
> >
> > So, thanks to those of you who tried to help.
> >
> > Alan
>
> I do remember doing a Win98/linux dual boot install for a customer
> (my first with win98) from a brand-new disk. I had the habit (with
> w95 dual-boots) of using dos fdisk to set up the initial primary
> dos partition, then an extended partition for the rest of the disk
> with no logical drives. Disk Druid found this easy enough to work
> with.
>
> Then I did that one installation and DD was totally confused.
> I ran fdisk (linux version) and it made several complaints about
> the shape of the extended partition, so I deleted it and created it
> again with linux fdisk. I have not left the safe world of FIPS and
> fdisk since then. Leave it to Microsoft to invent their own
> extended disk type just to be hostile to other op systems.
>
> I have heard reports of 98 wiping linux partitions and I was
> confused because on my dual boots I can't even use the 98 tools to
> remove "logical drives" in the extended partition area though it
> reports they are there and will not delete the extended partition
> even if it is empty.
>
> Now I understand better. Wow, what a cost to have GUI tools! And
> a hidden one at that.
>
> Civileme
