Well, there goes Windows!

[Warren Block]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2011, Michal Varga wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-08-18 at 16:24 -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> So, I used the bsdinstaller again on the 9.0-BETA1 media with manual
>> partitioning. The HP desktop ate up 3 partitions, I inconveniently
>> forgot that geom can't grok secondary PC MBR partitions, was fooling
>> around and cleared the partitions, etc. I hit abort to exit the
>> partitioner start and from scratch and now my Windows partitions and
>> recovery partitions are gone.
>
> Well, there's "gone" and there's really "gone" (but obviously, this is
> not a pleasant situation in any case).
>
> Just as a quick reminder for anyone who might not know (as this happens
> regularly) - sysutils/testdisk should be able to recover those cleared
> partitions pretty easily and put them back in place.

Or back up the GPT sectors first.

   dd if=/dev/ada0 of=gpt.bak bs=512 count=35

Or really, back up the whole disk first.  Clonezilla is handy for that.