[colug-432] testdisk is a lifesaver!

[Joshua Kramer]

So I finally got around to putting an SSD in my laptop.  This meant that I
now have a 640GB hard disk that I could put into an external enclosure, so
I did so.

But alas, the partitioning on this 640GB drive was inconvenient.  It had a
500MB boot partition, a 550GB /home partition, and 85GB / partition.  I
wanted to be able to use most of the 650GB as one contiguous filesystem.
So, I deleted the third (85GB) partition and did the simple fdisk trick of
deleting the second partiton and then re-creating it with the same
beginning cylinder and a different ending cylinder.  I did this and wrote
the partition table to disk.

Strangely, it wasn't automounting.  I then tried to mount /dev/sdb2 and it
gave me the dreaded "You must specify filesystem type" message.  Drat!  I
tried to re-create the exact structure as before via fdisk, but that didn't
work either.  The problem was that the boundaries between partition 1 and
partition 2 were not on cylinder boundaries... so instead of beginning on
sector 26, it began on sector 25.5.

Not sure how to get out of this, I did some Google-FU and found a program
called testdisk.  Supposedly, this would re-create your partition table for
you.  And indeed it did!  I deleted all of the partitions via fdisk.
Testdisk scanned the entire disk and re-created the original partition
table, and all three partitions magically re-appeared.
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