gpart

[OErjan]

i do not quite "trust" gpart, mainly cause of the tendency to make wrong diagnosis of large disk geometries, it is slightly unstable above 1024 cylinders (which is quite common today)

[Capricorny]

I had a suspicion, and tried the address given here, w/o the http:// prefix:

root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# wget ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gpart/gpart_0.1h-4.1_i386.deb 
--2010-02-04 22:48:15--  http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool...h-4.1_i386.deb
Resolving ftp.us.debian.org... 35.9.37.225, 64.50.236.52, 128.30.2.36, ...
Connecting to ftp.us.debian.org|35.9.37.225|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 36310 (35K) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `gpart_0.1h-4.1_i386.deb'

100%[======================================>] 36,310      45.7K/s   in 0.8s    

2010-02-04 22:48:16 (45.7 KB/s) - `gpart_0.1h-4.1_i386.deb' saved [36310/36310]

So, nothing wrong with the advice, really. And wget is your friend.

[sbininit]

i do not quite "trust" gpart, mainly cause of the tendency to make wrong diagnosis of large disk geometries, it is slightly unstable above 1024 cylinders (which is quite common today)

Is there a better way to recover the partition table? gpart rocked for me on that particular occasion. It might not the next time around. Maybe thats why it isn't included on Knoppix6.2.

[OErjan]

sadly every tool has it's limits, to eliminate errors I use several to get all information I can on the disk first
smartmontools
fdisk
sfdisk
testdisk

also I frequently use ddrescue and regular dd with flags conv=noerror,sync to "save" images of drives, it takes forever on large disks but it can save me in long run.
also I frequently use gzip to compress the image.

dd if=/dev/sdaX conv=noerror,sync | gzip -9 > /dev/sdbY/image.gz

sometimes I have used hex-edit to "rescue" important documents form such drive-images of damaged disks, it can be, uhm challenging but beter than total loss.
this is a jungle, I have been called by friends and friends of friends... to rescue "crashed" computers for two decades+ and I have only scratched the surface over that time, i have no banks of circuitboards from HDD's (ok a few), no clean rooms... i just try as best i can, if i see i can not do anything i say so and inform them about the more competent alternatives, sadly those come at a cost, some opt for that others not.

[sbininit]

sadly every tool has it's limits, to eliminate errors I use several to get all information I can on the disk first
smartmontools
fdisk
sfdisk
testdisk

also I frequently use ddrescue and regular dd with flags conv=noerror,sync to "save" images of drives, it takes forever on large disks but it can save me in long run.
also I frequently use gzip to compress the image.

dd if=/dev/sdaX conv=noerror,sync | gzip -9 > /dev/sdbY/image.gz

sometimes I have used hex-edit to "rescue" important documents form such drive-images of damaged disks, it can be, uhm challenging but beter than total loss.
this is a jungle, I have been called by friends and friends of friends... to rescue "crashed" computers for two decades+ and I have only scratched the surface over that time, i have no banks of circuitboards from HDD's (ok a few), no clean rooms... i just try as best i can, if i see i can not do anything i say so and inform them about the more competent alternatives, sadly those come at a cost, some opt for that others not.

Will dd work when you cant actually see that the hard drive exists with fdisk, df, or blkid?

[krishna.murphy]

Lets try it another way then. In a root terminal type:

 wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool...h-4.1_i386.deb

and then

dpkg -i gpart_0.1h-4.1_i386.deb

Thanks I couldn't get it with wget for some reason-


root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# wget http//ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gpart/gpart_0.1h-4.1_i386.deb
--2010-01-31 08:38:59-- http://http//ftp.us.debian.org/debia...h-4.1_i386.deb
Resolving http... failed: Name or service not known.
wget: unable to resolve host address `http'
root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix#


but I manually found found the .deb and opened it with debi package installer and now it works.

Hey-

note the extra http here: http://http//ftp.us.debian.org/ - happens all the time, IMHO

-Krishna