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.
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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
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