I checked out that post. It seems straight forward enough. Since I recovered all that I could I am not to worried if it fails, though I would love it if this works. I am cutting and pasting part of post #50 here and changing the hda to sda.

First two questions.

1- Can I do this from my installed Ubuntu or should I use my SystemRescueCD 0.3.5?
2 - sda is not bootable but this should work?

You can do it from ubuntu, and the fact that sda doesn't have a bootable partition on it doesn't matter.

OK. I am going to give this a try. I am vaguely familiar with hex editors (editing cheat codes for games, etc,) So lets see if I can do this right. Thanks.

LMAO.... Well,

I am not sure what I screwed up but I have decided to do something. I am setting up my older computer and teaching myself some new things. For ex. I am going to install Linux and probably Win98 and create problems and then see if I can fix them correctly (starting first with recreating this problem,) and doing that as many times as I need to until I get it right.

I somehow got the first partition to fill the whole drive (getting rid of the second partition.) No big deal, so I used the backup mbrimage.bin I created and put that back. I got all the correct sizes back but partition 2 is unallocated (I think I now what to do to fix that.) I just knew I was going to do something like that but it is helping me understand a few more things about this, which is why I want to set up my older computer and learn more.

Either way thank you.

Uhhh...

I guess I steered you a bit wrong. Post 50 told the person on that other thread how to fix her partition. Yours is different.

You would have wanted to change a type 82 to a type 83 partition.

What I really wanted you to do was post the contents of the MBR here on this board, as I had her do it on that other thread.

Ok. I misunderstood. I can still do that if it will still work?

It certainly should still work

Ok Give me a minute and I will post it. Now to make sure I understand this you want the contents of the file that I get using khexedit?

Ok. I wanted to give you the exact file I saved originally before I started messing with it, unless you want the one that is there now, (both?). So I uploaded it in pdf format here http://free-voices.net/print.pdf

I also added this, the actual file gz http://free-voices.net/mbrimage.bin.gz

Follow the instructions in post 42 of that other thread. This will give a hex listing of the MBR, and it will report what sfdisk -l has to say about the drive. The combination will give all the info needed to fix the partition table

actually that pdf works as well...wait a minute...

ok, I will leave that on and the gz file.

OK, from that pdf, you presently have only one partition defined on that hd. That partition is defined as a linux ext2/3 partition. Have you tried to mount it?

Even if the partition boundaries are messed up (and they might be; the second partition entry is completely zeroed out), we can still probably recover the partition table correctly so long as the first partition is correctly identified.

The file system is not the same as the partition; even if the partition has been redefined to cover the whole HD, the file system is the size of the old partition. So, try running fsck on /dev/sda1 and see if the file system can be recovered. If it can, then we'll work on getting the second partition back.

What does fdisk -l or sfdisk -l have to say?

$ sudo sfdisk -l /dev/sda1

Warning: start=63 - this looks like a partition rather than
the entire disk. Using fdisk on it is probably meaningless.
[Use the --force option if you really want this]


Also I can mount it but there is nothing there. I ran testdisk before and I could see all the files there, and folders.