Quote Originally Posted by kk39shadow
Ok, here is what gpart says:

Ok.

Guessed Primary Partition Table:
Primary partition(1)
type: 006(0x06)(Primary 'big' DOS (>32MB))
size: 47mb #s (96327) s(63-96389)
chs: (0/1/1)-(5/254/63)d (0/1/1-(5/254/63)r

Primary partition(2)
type: 007(0x07)(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX or Advanced UNIX)
size: 233609mb #s(478431760) s(96390-478528149)
chs: (6/0/1)-(1023/254/63)d (6/0/1)-(29786/254/5r

Primary partition(3)
type: 012(0x0C)(DOS or Windows 95 with 32 bit FAT,
LBA)
size: 4753mb #s(9735390) s(478528155-488263544)
chs: (1023/254/63)-(1023/254/63)d
(29787/0/1)-(30392/254/63)r

Primary partition(4)
type: 000(0x00)(unused)
size: 0mb #s(0) s(0-0)
chs: (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)d (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)r

Now, where do I go from here?
Thanks again
Since it appears that your "guessed" partitions are consistent, you can now rebuild your partition table. By consistent, I mean that all of your partitions appear to be in sequential order, so you don't have a partition that spills over into a neighboring partition.

From the data, it appears like you have a small DOS partition at the beginning of the disk (probably a BIOS/utility partition), followed by your main NTFS "C:" drive partition and a small approximately 4GB FAT32 partition (maybe an "E:" drive?) at the end of your disk.

So now you can run the same command again, only this time you can use it to WRITE a new partition table for your drive.

A command like this one should get the job done. The "W" needs to be an UPPERCASE letter:

gpart -W /dev/sda /dev/sda


Then you can reboot KNOPPIX and hopefully some new drive partition icons will appear on your desktop. You should then be able to copy any important files over to a USB drive or to a network shared drive.

Assuming that you now have a good partition table on your drive, you might even be able to save your Windows installation if you own the original CDROM. You will need to boot your Windows CDROM and then go into the "Recovery Console" and type in a command like this:

fixmbr


Here is an example of someone who used gpart to solve a similar problem as yours:

http://enterprise.linux.com/article..../10/11/1911211


If you get everything back up and running, you should take his advice and make a backup copy of your Master Boot Record including the partition table and store this file somewhere else like on a thumbdrive or a floppy disk.

To make a backup, type this in:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/mbr_backup.img bs=512 count=1

and the backup file will be called "mbr_backup.img" and it will be stored inside your /tmp directory (Temporary files are commonly stored there). Then copy this file to somewhere safe.

To restore your backup, first copy it back to the /tmp directory and then type:

dd if=/tmp/mbr_backup.img of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

Good Luck