[clue-tech] How to repair an overlapped partition

[David L. Anselmi]

Collins Richey wrote:
> On 9/9/06, Collins Richey <crichey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 9/9/06, Collins Richey <crichey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > 1. Does fdisk REALLY do nothing to any of the other partitions if I
>> > delete and reallocate hda3? Can I be sure that such an operation will
>> > not destory anything else on the disk?
>>
>> Obviously, I can try it out without actually rewriting the partition 
>> table.
> 
> Hmmm, that appears to work. If I delete partition 3, then select new,
> fdisk is smart enough to know  that only a primary partition is
> possible. fidsk still calculates the wrong starting cylinder 5755, but
> if I enter 5756 andthenaccept the ending cylinder address (it's
> correct), I get the desired results - overlap gone.

It is odd that fdisk doesn't get the right starting cylinder.  That 
would be worth asking the fdisk maintainers about, I think.

It seems likely that the boot sector of hda3 is using a block out of 
your NTFS, assuming that the partitions really overlap.  A free block, 
apparently.

It would be worth looking at the disk with cfdisk to see what it says. 
cfdisk usually tries harder to get good results than fdisk and ought to 
suggest something useful.  I think it will also handle swapping hda1 and 
hda2 automatically, to answer David's question.

Dave