Re: I just lost 32mb partition

[dempson@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

In article <11766GQYQNMVKGXAGFV@wbb.com>,  <mcfudge@wbb.com> wrote:
> 
> I did a bad thing.  :)   I used the Advanced Disk Utilities to make a
> little partiton on an already partitioned (and well used) 62mb drive.
> When the program warned me that doing so would destroy the data on this
> device, I understood "device" to mean "second partition" not the whole
> drive.

As you have discovered the hard way, the first part of each partition
gets wiped when you click the "Partition" button (on the screen with
the pretty diagram showing hard drive usage).

This happens even if you choose not to initialize each of the partitions.

I think that Chinook SCSI Utilities is able to _add_ a partition (if
you have sufficient free space), and even delete existing partitions
at the end of the drive, without affecting the earlier partitions.

I haven't tried this myself, and would only do so on a sacrificial drive.

> Oh well... I lost the whole 32mb of downloaded goodies that I haven't
> even unshrunk or debinsciid yet.  Is there any hope of using Prosel-16
> to reconstruct the bitmap, then use fix to repair the files that
> existed there?  Sigh.

It depends how much of each partition was overwritten.  At best,
you'll only have lost the root directory and bitmap, so you should be
able to use a volume repair utility to locate any subdirectories that
were on the disk (files in the root directory can also be located, but
are much harder to recover because the storage type, size, name, etc.
are lost).

I think that the amount overwritten when the drive is partitioned is
something in the region of 32k (64 blocks), so you are likely to have
lost some of the files at the start of the partition.

As long as the partition starts at the same block as before, and is
the same size (most likely if you originally partitioned the drive
using ADU), then it should be possible to recover most of the drive's
contents.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand