Have you ever sat at your laptop at 3am, looked at a mysterious low level boot loader prompt and think: "Oh no, did I just fsck up (in a bad way) my entire hard drive without having a recent backup?" Yup, you guessed it, I have a pretty much dead hard drive. Hopefully this doesn't get too long... Does anyone have any experience with data recovery? Grabbing files off a hidden ext2/3 partition? Rebuilding a partition table? Here's what I my disk looked like before this whole thing started: [Primary: Windows xp ntfs] [Primary: [logical: data ntfs] [logical: data ntfs] [logical Linux swap] [logical linux root ext3]] I was messing with one of my partitions, trying to copy an OS image onto it, and all seemed to go well. In fact I was still able to boot into my primary OS, Linux . Basically, I had used dd to copy an image onto that second ntfs partition. So at that point, it must have looked like this: [Primary: windows xp ntfs] [Primary: [logical: data ntfs] [logical: new image] [logical Linux swap] [logical Linux root ext3]] As I said earlier, I could still boot using lilo, but unfortunately I was having trouble getting lilo to boot the new image. I looked online, and it looked like I should use grub, specifically, the chainloader. So I went ahead and grabbed grub. I tweaked the config file, installed it onto the MBR, and rebooted... No luck; it kept complaining about not being able to find a few partitions, most of them! I booted off some live cd's, and the result was the same, here is what my partition table looks like now [Primary: Windows xp ntfs] [Primary: unrecognized format] Somewhere down the line, it seems I hosed the partition table. The first primary partition seems intact, but the second does not show any of the logical partitions. windows xp can start booting, but then I get the BSOD pretty early on, probably due to the missing ntfs data drive. On to the data recovery: I really don't need anything from the windows installation, it was pretty minimal anyways (I'm on Linux about 95% of the time). Even so, I could get the files easily with a boot cd. Then there is that first ntfs data drive. It will definitely not be missed: at the time, it was actually empty. Then there is the new OS image. I could care less about that one. It was an experimental thing anyways. Linux swap? 'nuff said But the Linux root, that's what I'd like to recover. There are actually some documents on there which I would very much like to not lose. Considering that I was able to boot off of it up to a few minutes before the trouble started, I am fairly convinced that the partition itself is intact. That is, all the right the bits are still there. The question is, how could I get to it? or at least, how do I get to the files? I would go so far as to wait for a byte-by-byte scan kind of solution, if I knew of one which would reliably work. I do have an external USB drive available. I was thinking of simply imaging the entire hd onto the external, wipe it out and start from scratch, then try to recover stuff from the image later, but I think I'm going to wait for someone else's opinion. Perhaps I can even rebuild the partition table or something. Luckily, there's a few weeks until school starts, so I honestly don't really _need_ to use the machine until then. One more detail: my laptop has no floppy drive :( Thanks for reading all of this, Any help is appreciated! Robert ps, remember, I don't have a running system, so I may not get back to herefor a while...

Tried a search on the 'Web for "Partition repair" or "partition recovery"??? Rule #1 Good computers don't go down. Rule #2 There is no such thing as a good computer.