Lost my partition table - can I recover?

[Scott Garman]

On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 10:02, Marc Nozell wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 09:38, Scott Garman wrote:
> > My situation: I have an HP server with two hot-swap SCSI drive bays.
> > It's got a RAID controller in it, which has to "initialize" new drives
> > before they can be recognized by the controller. It refers to them as
> > "logical" drives. 
> > 
> > I have inadvertently deleted the logical drive on the original disk, and
> > I can not boot to Linux anymore. I am certain that all that's happened
> > is the RAID controller re-wrote a new partition table with no
> > partitions. When I boot from a RHEL 3.0 CD in rescue mode, it sees the
> > drive detected as /dev/cciss/c0d0, whereas before it was
> > /dev/cciss/c0d0p1. 
> > 
> 
> The /dev/cciss/c0d0 refers to the entire first disk (think /dev/sda),
> while /dev/cciss/c0d0p1 (think /dev/sda1) refers to the first partition 
> on the first disk.
> 
> Um, did you just trash your entire disk? 

I'm not sure - the RAID controller says that data loss will occur if you
delete a logical drive. I mistakenly deleted the logical drive of this
disk. It takes no time at all for this to take effect, so I assumed that
it just deleted the partition table. 

I tried using fdisk to create one large partition on the disk, hoping
that mount would look at the beginning of the partition to find the
filesystem, but I was unable to mount anything.

Unfortunately, the point is moot now. I've decided to restore from last
night's backup. 

Scott

-- 
Scott Garman
sgarman at iname dot com