[ILUG] Tale of woe / Norton Disk Doctor Equivilant for Linux ????

[Glen Gray]

Hi Guys, something to brighten your monday mornings, sorry if it's a bit
long

Had a nasty experience Saturday night. For some reason my partition
tables got a bit messed up. I had been running linux for a good few days
and decided to have a game of Rogue Spear. Booted into windows had a
good play and went to boot back into Linux. Got the dreaded LIL-. Arghh
!!!. Now I'n not had that much need to rescue Linux installs so forgive
me if what I was doing was stupid. It was late and to be honest I didn't
really know what the fcuk I was doing.

So booted into my trusty boot disk but for some reason I couldn't mount
the linux partiton in read write mode. Managed to get it mounted in read
only but got no where fast with lilo. Can't remember the errors sorry.
So I figured out the remount thing and was able to remount the partition
in read write. Still got now where. I tried everything I could think of
(which wasn't much :-) lilo -r /mnt/linux_root, no joy, modified the
lilo.conf to point to /mnt/linux_root and tried a plain old lilo, no
joy. Saw mention of chroot but it was very late at this point and I
couldn't figure out what to do with it. Lilo was spewing out the same
error no matter what, something along the lines of the partiton didn't
have a valid LILO signature. Even though I was trying to put one on it
??? Tried to have a look at the partitions using fdisk but it gave out
and error saying that it was unable to access the device. Got a bit of a
fright at this piont and figured my drive was heading for the grave.

So I resigned to the fact that it was not going anywhere so backed up my
files and decided to re-install. Booted up with the updated redhat disk
images to use the new anaconda etc. Managed to make it to the point
where it formats the partitions and then it hung. I really thought my
drive was headed for the great big disk array in the sky at this point.
So I said sod it and went to bed. Went back at it last night with a
clear head and decided to boot back into my boot disk and kill the
partitions compeletely. Oh shit fdisk still won't let me at the disk.
Decided to go back to the drawing board and check if Windows was still
OK. It was. Hmm. I tried Norton Disk Doctor and it said my partitons
were a bit messed up and asked did I want them fixed. By all means yes.
It did it's thing I rebooted and was able setup again.

So the short question is, is there a Norton Disk Doctor equivilant for
linux ?

Glen