I've got an old Sony vaio 505g, that I like very much, and it's quite
linux friendly.  However, twice now since since getting it a month ago,
I've un-suspended only to find the partition table on hda completely
gone.  The first time I hastily forced a fsck on /hda1 from the redhat
6.2 rescue mode and lost any hope of recovery.  However, upon formatting
and re-installing the redhat install couldn't read the disk, write the
disk, or create a partition table.  Assuming the drive had died I used
it as an excuse to replace for 2gig drive with a 4gig drive.

Now, two weeks after installing the 4gig -- two weeks during which
everything worked perfectly -- the same thing has happened.  The
partition table is just plain missing.  A boot into rescue mode shows
that that data's still on the drive, but fdisk reports no paritition
table.  Since I had nothing special on that drive I decided to re-format
and the same thing's happening.  Fdisk says it's writing out a parition
table, gives no errors, but then when I run fdisk again, there's no info
in the partition table.

I notice that there's a discrepancy between the heads/sector/cylindar
counts given by the BIOS (where they're autodetected) and fdisk, but I
don't know enough about disk geometries to tell if that's healthy
deception on the part of lilo to trick its way past some max partition
size nonsense, or if the it's the cause of my problems.

Does anyone have any tips they can give me?  There's the remote
possibility that this new disk is died too, but I think it's more likely
that I'm doing something stupid and that first one was okay too.  Help!

-- 
Ry4an Brase - http://ry4an.org                                    /~\
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