Re: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda - wrong signature 3739
just resize /dev/sda6 a bit (50MiB up or down (and back if you want) ) and it will (most likely) fix everything
Re: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda - wrong signature 3739
or just run resize_reiserfs /dev/sda6 
Re: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda - wrong signature 3739
thanks plors,
will try that... also, what about switching /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda4 so that sda4 is again the extended partition and sda3 is again the Dell Recovery partition?
spidey
Re: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda - wrong signature 3739
resize_reiserfs /dev/sda6 worked just fine, and i mounted sda6 and i appear to have all my data! YAY!
holy crap, what a relief. i've learned so much about partitions and filesystems thanks to this whole experience that i'm almost grateful things went wrong 
spidey
Re: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda - wrong signature 3739
i think you confused a 3 and a 4 while copying the details
Thanks for not panicking, as long as you remain calm it's very hard to actually lose data
Just for the record, partitioning is usually a bit easier than this 
We're working on a solution for this issue.
31 2006-09-14 11:44:20 (edited by spiderworm 2006-09-14 11:44:49)
Re: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda - wrong signature 3739
plors,
i DID NOT confuse 3 and 4 when copying the data.
if it pleases the court, let me offer that this hard drive originally shipped with three partitions: 1 was the 7.5MB fat16 drive that i think windows uses for boot, 2 was 76GB of ntfs for windows, and 3 was the 4.64 Dell Restore Partition. When I installed Linux on the system, partition 2 (ntfs) was resized and then partitions 4, 5, and 6 were created: 4 was the extended partition, 5 was linux-swap, and 6 was my reiserfs. even though the partitions were a little out of order on the drive, i promise that /dev/sda3 WAS the Dell Recovery partition, and /dev/sda4 WAS the extended partition. I really would like those put back as they were.
spider
Re: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda - wrong signature 3739
indeed, 4 was extended and you resized it from 34.62 GiB to 53.78 GiB
further move you moved 5 (swap) and 6 (reiserfs)
While recreating the partitiontable numbers are assigned in sequential order. in other words, the lowest available number is used when creating a partition, which can explain the difference between earlier stuff. Numbering though is not really important (although it may require you to change some stuff in /etc/fstab). If this is really important to you, you can delete and add partitions in different order to get the numbering as you want, but this is dangerous and not necessary imho.
Just to be clear, different numbering does NOT endanger your data
Re: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda - wrong signature 3739
Plors,
I understand that the data will still be on the drive, but what happens if I ever need to use the Dell Restore utility (which i can do from the POST screen by pressing F8 or something like that) and it tries to boot /dev/sda3? I doubt they made their app smart enough to check other partitions to see if the partition label to something other than 3.
I don't think I'll have any trouble with the extended partition being a different number since it is just an extended partition. I shouldn't have to change anything in fstab.
spiderworm
Re: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda - wrong signature 3739
i don't know anything of the DRU, but do you think you'll ever need it? Anyway, you have all the data you need to change numbers of partitions, afaik there is no other way then deleting an recreating partitions if you want to change their numbers.
I can't help you further with changing numbers, maybe in the future gparted will offer this functionality in a nice gui, but i think this is at least a couple of months away. Track progress on that in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=327261
btw, if you are interested in implementing this, please say so. I can introduce you to the libparted people and we can talk about this.
Re: Invalid partition table on /dev/sda - wrong signature 3739
plors,
you're probably right, i hope to not need to ever use the recovery thing. it wouldnt be that big of a pain to use fdisk to delete then recreate those partitions, so someday i'll probably give that a go.
about me helping write parted or gparted, unless they are written in PHP/MySQL or Javascript, I wouldn't be able to do much.
I think there's only one more thing I have to say: THANK YOU SO MUCH! I LITERALLY tried to get help from a DOZEN other places and EVERYBODY ELSE either couldn't or wouldn't help me. THANK YOU A TON! you have saved me a lot of frustration and time. I could not have done it without you.
If there's anything I can ever do to repay the favor, give me a shoutout with my contact information here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Spiderworm
Thanks again. You the man! (or woman if you happen to be a woman 
)
spiderworm