NobodyHere
8th April 2006, 02:49 AM
Hey all- I was mucking about to see if I could get XP installed on an external drive, and in the process of switching between firewire+USB interfaces, deleted the wrong partition (sort order of internal vs. external changed!)
WinXP's installer faithfully made the change iiiiiimmmediately.
The GPT partition table is still there- but there's a nice big hole starting at block 1, going all the way up to almost the end of the drive.
Reviewing the manpage for "gpt", which is the GUID/GPT partition equivalent of fdisk, there is an "add" command, which allows one to specify the starting+ending blocks, and partition type.
My theory is that I can add a HFS partition in the right "spot", and everything will magically work again. My concern is that the tool might zero out the space, or be "helpful" and create a HFS+ filesystem as well. I'm pretty sure it won't, but I was wondering if anyone could either confirm this will work, try it on an external scratch disk (maybe a disk image file would work, even?), or...something!
I'm currently waiting for "dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/Volumes/External/backup.dd" to finish (23GB out of 100 done...looks like another 2 hours to go or so) before I go mucking about...if I find a solution, I promise to post back with what worked, in case anyone makes a similar mistake.
By the way, I'd like to send a special shout-out to "CaptObvious", one of the ops in #winonxp, whose helpful, knowledgeable insight was "you're screwed and you should pay better attention", and spent a couple of minutes lambasting me for not backing up (I had- a week or so ago, and I'd like to keep the last week's data.) Always nice to see ops who are kind and helpful like that to someone in need!
Thanks to SuitCase, who was actually helpful and willing to discuss the problem...
WinXP's installer faithfully made the change iiiiiimmmediately.
The GPT partition table is still there- but there's a nice big hole starting at block 1, going all the way up to almost the end of the drive.
Reviewing the manpage for "gpt", which is the GUID/GPT partition equivalent of fdisk, there is an "add" command, which allows one to specify the starting+ending blocks, and partition type.
My theory is that I can add a HFS partition in the right "spot", and everything will magically work again. My concern is that the tool might zero out the space, or be "helpful" and create a HFS+ filesystem as well. I'm pretty sure it won't, but I was wondering if anyone could either confirm this will work, try it on an external scratch disk (maybe a disk image file would work, even?), or...something!
I'm currently waiting for "dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/Volumes/External/backup.dd" to finish (23GB out of 100 done...looks like another 2 hours to go or so) before I go mucking about...if I find a solution, I promise to post back with what worked, in case anyone makes a similar mistake.
By the way, I'd like to send a special shout-out to "CaptObvious", one of the ops in #winonxp, whose helpful, knowledgeable insight was "you're screwed and you should pay better attention", and spent a couple of minutes lambasting me for not backing up (I had- a week or so ago, and I'd like to keep the last week's data.) Always nice to see ops who are kind and helpful like that to someone in need!
Thanks to SuitCase, who was actually helpful and willing to discuss the problem...