Hi, just wondering if someone can help me understand why this might be... I'm waaay new to this (everything I know I learned here/have an unfinished thread in the windows forum), and ended up here as I suppose many do because during a Win2K reinstall my MBR and/or partition table(s) got trashed, and all my data was "gone".

Now that I've had a few stable hours in knoppix, and followed the great explanation in this thread for fixing partition tables, I've got a good (beginner's) handle on cfdisk.

Sorry that's a lot of preliminary for...

I have two SATA drives, so /dev/sda and /dev/sdb rather than hda and hdb, otherwise they seem to work the same? cfdisk has successfully restored my sda partitions, and reactivated the wandering/lost boot partition as it should have (btw why when there is only "free space" and sda5+ does it activate as sda2? but I digress...)

sdb shows up in cfdisk as one big drive (120GB) and a little left over, but the thing I don't get is, why do I correctly have mounted sdb1 2 and 3 in knoppix if cfdisk says those partitions don't exist? I'd love to just rewrite my sdb partition table as it was--and as knoppix recognizes it--but cfdisk says no go? Is there a way to rebuild the table as knoppix reads it, and not as cfdisk does?

Thanks for running a great forum...