oops, no partition table

[Mark J. Dulcey]

Matthew Gillen wrote:
> 
> As long as you haven't touched it yet (ie tried to mount/format), you can 
> just set it back to a single big partition and you should be good to go. 
> You can screw up partition tables badly, as long as you can put them back 
> exactly like they were before, the filesystems will never be the wiser.

That is true of the GNU/Linux partitioning tools; they only write the 
partition table and leave the rest of the disk alone. Exception: 
creating extended partitions will damage data because the partitioning 
data for those is stored at the beginning of the partitions themselves. 
You can read more at http://home.att.net/~rayknights/pc_boot/ext_tbls.htm

DOS is another story. FDISK clears at least the first sector of any 
partition it creates so that the partition will appear empty to the 
FORMAT program. I don't know whether that is also true of the partition 
tools in current versions of Windows.