Here's 'fdisk -l'. (sdb is a usb disk I connected later.) The warnings seems to corroborate cinap's comment, is it so? The dump: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10125317/sda.16.dump (dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.16.dump bs=4096 count=16) That should be the 1st. 16 sectors I hope. I checked (dumpe2fs) the bs of sda3 (this partition is intact) to use the above bs. Also, to boot into my Windows, I had fixed the mbr using the Windows 'fixmbr' command. So you will find an intact mbr, and therefore not a very useful thing, the dump will turn out to be. This exercise is turning out to be interesting. May I ask how you would have worked on the dump, and what could be learnt from looking into it? And what did you mean by : cat /dev/sd*/ctl, it didn't work for me? I used sda and sda5. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Warning: Partition 5 does not end on cylinder boundary. Warning: Partition 6 does not end on cylinder boundary. Warning: Unable to open /dev/sr0 read-write (Read-only file system). /dev/sr0 has been opened read-only. Error: /dev/sr0: unrecognised disk label Disk /dev/sda: 320 GB, 320070320640 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 6374 51199123 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 6375 31298 200193997 f Extended LBA /dev/sda5 6375 30689 195302205 83 Linux /dev/sda6 30690 31297 4875727 82 Linux swap /dev/sda3 31299 37359 48676950 83 Linux /dev/sda4 37360 37759 3204967 39 Plan 9 Disk /dev/sdb: 1000 GB, 1000202273280 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 97 779121 b FAT32 /dev/sdb2 98 1403 10482412 83 Linux /dev/sdb3 1404 121601 965482402 83 Linux ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------