Hello everyone! In a DELL machine running SUSE10 I wanted to read-only my files in an older hard-disk with WIN95 installed. I installed the old drive as a slave and booted. Unfortunatelly I could not mount it so I got the "brilliant" idea: fdisk /dev/hdb and wrote a new partition table of course that was not "enough" mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 Naturally I can only see the the linux partition in hdb Is there a way to recover the WIN partition table? Please help anyone?

for win 95 there might be an option in fdisk to rebuild the mbr i'm not exactly sure if that encompases the partition table? get a setup cd or boot disk for 95 and try running fdisk? Yeah I don't have a clue just a guess... -DeathKnight Sniper

Sorry to point out, but Linux did not overwrite your partition table but you did. As far as i can gather from your text above, you have written a new label on the disk with: fdisk /dev/hdb and after that you have written a new filesystem on the first slice (partition) of the disk with: mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 So i am afraid that you have effectively killed your windows95 as windows95 is always installed on the first slice of the disk.

This might be worth a try: http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/ - 'gpart' is a program that will attempt to reconstruct the partition table on a hard disk from the data on it, by detecting the start and end of various types of file systems. But unfortunately it sounds very likely that you've screwed it completely with that 'mkfs' command.