[wellylug] Help needed.

[David Chord]

Hi all. 

Ok.. So I admit it from the start. I should not have played with low=level 
type commands when I was stressed and tired. 

My nephew's MP3 player stopped working in his system a while back. Read-only 
access to it and no write access. Failed on Linux, and on windows it 
completely failed to read. 

I spent a while on his machine trying to get it to work (started as Ubuntu 5 
but got upgraded to 7.1 during the weekend). I searched all sorts of sites, 
mainly reputeable ones, for answers to why this behaviour was happening. 
Most suggested a corrpupted file system and to use mkdev.vfat -I /dev/disk. 
Which I tried a couple of times on his machine, with no luck. 

In the end I took it to my laptop, first to try it under windows - no luck, 
even with the provided drivers. Rebooted into Linux and was able to deal to 
a couple of corrupted video files and get my computer to talk to it 
happily.. 

And just to be sure I ran what I had run numerous times before without issue 
 - mkfs.vfat -I /dev/sda 

The command took less than a second to complete. I removed his player, got 
him to try it out - worked fine. Did a few more things and shut the machine 
down a while later. 

On restarting the computer - "non-bootable disk". Oops.. /dev/sda on his 
computer is the MP3 player, but on mine it's the main HDD. 

I am optimistic that the partition table alone has been screwed, and the 
data on the disk is easily recoverable - but only because it completed so 
quickly and I was able to do a fair bit for a while afterwards.. (And yes, 
had I suspected that there was any risk of loss of data I would've backed 
up). 

I do have some stuff I would rather not loose. I can probably recover 
anything important. But it would be nice to be able to run some simple 
partition table recovery program and not have to go through the pain of 
reinstalling windows, or the minor annoyance of picking which distro to try 
next... 

Years ago I had a dos 6.22 program that would quickly and happily restore 
damaged partitions. I probably still have it. But.. I don't know if it would 
be able to find NTFS or Ext3 partitions, let alone the swap. 

The disk should have 1 Ext3, 1 swap and 1 NTFS partition. The latter two can 
be wiped, but it is the first one that I want most. What is shown is 1 
rather large FAT32 :( 

Thanks in advance to anyone out there willing/able to help :) 

Oh, and a "Hello" to anyone on here I know from elsewhere... :) 

Take care,
David