<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>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.<br><br></div>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.<br>
<br></div>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.<br>
<br></div>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.<br>
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