Fun with partition tables...

[Henrik W Lund]

Greetings, list!

I'm asking this question with the (very faint) hope that someone knows 
of any way to help me recover my drive. Allow me to explain:

I'm dual booting Windows XP and FreeBSD/amd64 on two different physical 
drives. I installed boot0 to the disk that had Windows XP on it (all on 
a single partition, mind you) and it was running fine, dual booting was 
a breeze. However, when I installed a third drive, things went funny, 
and the BIOS no longer reported the FreeBSD drive (it's on a RAID 
controller), so that boot0 no longer saw it. Fine, not much that can be 
done about that.

Upon fiddling with BIOS settings, I discovered a built-in BIOS boot 
device selector, and decided to remove the boot0 from my Windows drive 
(since it didn't do anything useful anyway). This is where I messed up.

Under /dev, I have ad2 (the windows drive), and ad2s1 (the partition 
that has Windows on it - this is the only partition on the drive). The 
command

fdisk -B /drive/

will install a default boot manager, so I did an

fdisk -B /dev/ad2

as root, only to get an "Operation not permitted" error. Thinking this 
funny, I did a

fdisk -B /dev/ad2s1

which worked. Alas, this was my undoing. A reboot yielded boot0 still 
popping up, but when trying to boot Windows, I got the dreaded "Invalid 
partition table" message. The horror!

Back into FreeBSD, I reran the

fdisk -B /dev/ad2

which now worked for some reason, and a reboot showed that boot0 was in 
fact gone, but the partition table was still invalid.

A number of silly mistakes made by me in the following frustrating hours 
included running

fdisk -I /dev/ad2

(forgot the -t flag) because I had half given up on ever seeing my data 
again. In hindsight, I see that my best bet would have been to boot the 
recovery console off of the WinXP CD and ran fixboot and fixmbr, but 
it's a bit late for that now. I did eventually run fixboot, and it 
placed a FAT16 partition table entry on the disk (I originally had NTFS 
on it).

Now, my question is this: is there any hope of me ever seeing my data 
again? Seeing as how the entire disk was originally covered in a single 
NTFS partition, is it possible to add an entry for such and access the 
files once again? This is a long shot, I know, but you never know...

Thanks for any and all help!


-- 
Henrik W Lund