“Messing up your hard disk’s partition table doesn’t take much
effort, especially when you’re preparing a dual-boot machine. Even
a mistimed fdisk /mbr can spell disaster, erasing the master boot
record (MBR) and making the disk unusable. But victims of damaged
MBRs rejoice — gpart can save your day. This utility scans a hard
disk and prepares a partition table of areas that resemble a
partition, which you can use to make the disk bootable again.“Gpart is short for ‘guess partitions,’ and it can do just that
with a variety of filesystems, including FAT 16/32, NTFS, EXT2/3,
Linux Swap, ReiserFS, *BSD Disklabels, and several others. To
install it, download the source code and compile it with make and
make install (as root). Gpart is also included in live
distributions such as Knoppix, which makes it more
accessible…”
Related Story:
Linux.com:
Dual-Booting Windows and Linux the Easy Way(Jul 24, 2006)