[OT] Maxtor ate my partition table

[John Wendel]

Just wanted to post a little cautionary tale.

Got new Maxtor disk. Installed as hda. Stupidly, decided to use Maxtor 
software to partition disk. During the install, it complained that hdb 
(Western digital) was formatted with an incompatible disk overlay, and 
offered to "fix" it. Fool that I am, I said OK. Started to partition the new 
disk and noticed that it wanted to install some sort of crap disk overlay, so 
I cancelled the operation.

At this point, I tried to boot from hdb and got the nice "NO PARTITION TABLE" 
message. Thanks a lot Maxtor!!! Of course, I didn't have a record of the 
partition table to restore from.

So, after a lot of googling and reading some nice web sites, I booted a 
KNOPPIX cd and ran testdisk. It quickly (and correctly) discovered the old 
partition structure and rebuilt the table.

Lessons learned:

Don't use disk vendor software to partition a disk.
Keep a record of your partition tables.
Knoppix is a great rescue system.
"testdisk" is a great piece of code.

Regards,

John