How to repair partition table?

I have 320GB SATA HDD in my laptop. I accidently corrupted the partition table while messing with the partitions.

I was creating/deleting some partitions using vista's disk manager. Some logical partition apart from my C: and D:, rest all went missing.

I used Acronis disk director to scan and recover deleted partitions. Everything is ok now. Partitions are accessible and data is intact. However, I need to install CentOS (linux) on one of the partitions. The partition tools under linux is not able to make sense of the current partition table and wants to 're-initialize' the whole disk destroying all the data.


So....

I need a tool or a method to scan my partitions and safely write a new PT without messing with my data.

Somehow, vista is doing well under present scenario, but, rest OSs are not happy with it.

Please suggest some tried and tested methods. I just almost lost 300GB data. Thanks to Acronis, I recovered it!

You can give a shot to PartedMagic. It's a linux livecd for the sole purpose of partition manipulation.

Welcome to the Frontpage

I have used it to manipulate HDD with WinXP NTFS partitions without issues. As long as you do not resize your Vista partition, I think it should work fine with Vista too.

BTW, my understanding is that you don't 3rd party software to resize Vista partitions. The below were steps i found quite some time ago on the net for resizing Vista partitions

1>Click on the Start menu
2>Right click on Computer and click on Manage
3>In left pane, open Storage category and click on Disk
Management
4>Now Right click on the partition you'd like to modify.
5>Click on Extend Volume or Shrink Volume to extend or
shrink the selected partition to desired size

I have no issues doing resizing etc.

The thing is that somehow, someway the partition table (which has account of all the sectors, geometry information about all the partitions on the drive) has got somewhat corrupted.

I know of linux sfdisk command, which allows manual editing of the partition table and mbr. But, I rather not experiment with that. I want to use an easier tool.

this looks good : DiskPatch User Guide

Try Testdisk.. Certainly handy and useful software .. I have recovered the table a lot of times

Acronis disk director (comes with partition recovery) . One of best one's i have ever used . For data recovery only, use r-tools.

Use PTDD software

Ok thanks guys, I tinkered with manual editing the PT for the last few days and got my data back.

Lots of maths involved