Hmmm. Well, the main partition table - the teeny-tiny one that limits you to only four primary partitions - is in the drive's first sector along with the MBR. It sounds like NAV rewrote that as part of getting rid of the potential virus.

It could have given the newly unallocated space back to Windows, which you might not have noticed, or it might have left it as unallocated. Either way, the Linux data was still on the drive.

Going back immediately after NAV did its thing, the whole 512 bytes of sector 0 could have been restored. LILO could have written a new boot portion of the sector from its configuration file or even re-installed the pre-Knoppix copy that it automatically backed up.

I didn't know about gpart - thanks, Harry! But even without gpart, a partition-table editor could have been used to re-create the pre-Norton status, for example from a printout or handwritten notes you made the last time you changed the partitions.

The Knoppix distro provides at least four Linux partition editors (I've used fdisk, cfdisk, parted, and qtparted) along with documentation and access to source code so you can see for yourself what they do.

I think there are a couple of lessons buried in your painful experience with NAV. One is that Windows' ease of use comes at the price of giving control over your machine to software that you also can't control. The other is to have backups - or at least notes - for important stuff.

Now for a ray of sunshine on this gloomy landscape! PowerQuest - of Partition Magic fame - used to have a couple of Windows tools to let you view and edit partition tables. They worked on the primary table in the MBR and on the tables for extended partitions too.

The bad news is that PowerQuest no longer exists. The good news is that partinfo and ptedit live on. The better news is that they're free! Wheeee!

The ironic news is that Nort ... errr .... Symantec bought PowerQuest, and you can download these and a few other Windows tools here: ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/englis.../pq/utilities/. For Win98 get PartIn9x.zip and ptedit.zip.

A tiny bit of documentation for partinfo is at http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...256e75007cb02d and for ptedit at http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...256e75007ca1e5

If these urls don't work because the lines are too long, enter 2004073190203662 and 2004063693751462 at http://www.symantec.com/search/

Hack on!

-- Ed