Attempted to fix my Win98 partition.  It had somehow become unbootable via
the ntldr.  This occured after I used Linux FDISK to add an extended
partition to put my growing WMP (warez/mp3/pr0n) collection.  Everything
at this point was fine:  NT booted without a hitch and linux screamed as
usual.

Popped into Win98 using the repair boot disk, hoping to reinstall
win98.  98 Didn't seem to like what seemed an otherwise fine and dandy 2nd
partition.  So i used 98's FDISK to repartition.  This might not have been
the case since 98's FDISK won't do more than one primary
partition.  Hmm.  Could have been NT perhaps?  I don't think I got a
chance to format.

Partition Content
1 2G      NT
2 2G      89
3 4G      /linux
4 extended
 5 128M swap
 6 4G linux

I rebooted and attempted to boot linux, but it went bezerk.  It wasn't
able to mount the drive.  FSCK spit up crazy messages and just died.  It
turns out 98's (or NT's) FDISK doesn't like linux's FDISK and changed a
few of the partition boundaries around.  Or it just didn't honor them
since the latter part of the Linux partition was hosed.

Freaked out at this point.  Since the 98 partition was gone anyways, i
reinstalled linux on partition 2 and began working on a utility that would
allow me to fondle and tease block devices.  I was hoping to figure out
what exactly went wrong so that I could massage the partition into a state
that ext2 utilities wouldn't barf at (or core for that matter).  If I had
known then what I know now, I would have let E2FSCK just done it's
job.  Although it would have taken hours.  With a little coaxing, I was
able to mutate the partition super block so that that it reported a few
less blocks available.  This spead up E2FSCK's job since it didn't have to
attempt to fix the last few corrupted blocks.

I successfully finished an alpha version of the block device utility,
tweaked the fux0red linux partition, 3, and allowed E2FSCK to do it's
thing.  I then copied over all the important stuff from 3 to the temporary
linux partition 2.  I then backed up the remaining stuff I dind't delete
(don't know why i copied and deleted some things from 3 to 2 and copied
(not delted) others) to partition 6.  6 was 4 gig's and contained
basically my entire PC/online life.  That's never been in danger
fortunately.

At this point, I felt very cocky.  So I re-MKE2FS'ed partition 3 and
copied 2 back over since 3 was 4G's and I wanted to put win98 back on 2,
which was my original goal.  I re-ID'd 2 and formatted using linux's
MKDOSFS.  Everything seemed fine.  Booted Win98 via floppy and took a look
at D drive (partition 2 i thought).  It was there, but not very
healthy.  The disk ID was tweaked and SCANDISK, which is always done prior
to any M$ OS install, puked.  I thought perhaps the linux MKDOSFS was no
good so used DOS's FORMAT to format D:.  That went smoothly.  A little to
smooth.

I rebooted to see if linux was still fine....................  It was
gone.  I thought perhaps I didn't lilo correctly (although I knew at the
time I did)  so booted off a floppy and got the same error.  Something
like can't find this or that.  Tried with partition 2 with the same dir
results.

I couldn't belive it.  I had successfully trashed my filesystem for the
2nd time.  Being the resourcefull person that I am, I calmly went to my
closet and wipped out my old gateway drive.  I set it to master, stuck it
in my b0xen and booted.  Voila, linux is once again back up.  I can mount
the extreemly sick drive at this point...both partition 2 and 3 are
beautifully formatted DOS partition.  One even has the system installed on
it.

Not knowing at this point how brutal the DOS format is and realizing that
my brilliant block device utility was on those seemingly useless
partitions, I panicked.  I called all my friends and told them that I was
sad.  But I knew this was a good thing.  I knew I would have to rewrite
the utility which would result in a better one...it always does.

After a few hours I was back in business.  The utilty was beginning to
become more usefull than before.  Since I was familiar with the EXT2
filesystem I was able to do it all without online documentation or FAQ's.
I also used my extended knowledge of the existing EXT2 utilites to aid in
my endeavors.  I used the -s swtich in MKE2FS to re-write the super
blocks.  So I did a 'mke2fs -S /dev/hda2' and to my horror it happily
reset my 4096 block partition to a 1024 block partition.  What this means
is that it flung about 4 times more block headers around the partition,
corrupting it even further.  Another cold chill down my spine at this
point. I passed it the paramter to force a 4096 block size, which did the
trick.  But the damage was done, at least to this partition.  I still
basically had a mirror on the 3rd partition.  So if anything, any
discrepancies I stumbled upon with 2 I could probably overcome with the
data from 3.

While I attempted to fix DOS's work, which was pretty minor from an EXT2
FS's point of view, I did the unthinkable, once again.  I passed dd the
wrong device letter.  Rather than /dev/hdb2 which was what partition 2 was
called being a slave, I told it to wipe out blocks 4-7 on /dev/hda2.  This
just happened to be the drive I was on.  Claw was now corrupt.

I belive I went to sleep at this point.  I didn't sleep well.  Reality for
me became a haze.  I don't really know what people were saying from time
to time.  This wasn't so good.  I had spent the last two weeks trying to
deal with the first 2 disasters.  Now I had compounded the problem during
a week with midterms.

Since I need linux, i backed up the ColdFusion work from the NT partition
1 and installed slakware.  I was running out of partitions in which to
work really fast.  This was the last one before I had to turn to unknown
means to have linux running.

My brain, working in overdrive at this point, became very clear.  I spent
more time thinking about how I was going to correct the problem than doing
anything.  After doing miserably on a midterm, I skipped class (sorry
Andy) and ran (partly) home to make everything right once and forall.  I
wipped up, for the 3rd time, a block device editor.  Used it to realize
that all i needed to do was fix the 2nd inode, on both partition 2 and 3,
so that MOUNT could find the root directory.  Once I performed the precise
DD operations to copy, from partition 6, an inode pointing to the root
directory block, I performed a mount.

Voila.  Partition 2 and 3 were now viewable.  I used the block editor to
realize my DD boo-boo on claw, as well as a note i left my self on the
white board saying that I overworte blocks 4-7.  All i did was over write
a few group descriptor blocks.  So I re-wrote them from one of the copies
and mounted...successfully.

Everything was now nice and beautiful.  I quickly copied over both
partition 2 and 3 to partition 6, which was nearly maxed out with backup's
of backup's of backup's.  I know finish up this report on my experiences
for the last 2 or 3 weeks.  Hopefully nothing will go wrong as I replace
partitions 1-3 with two 4 gig partitions running a fresh install of
slakware.
 =^_^=