Windows broke my setup

Well, I reverted my Windows XP x64 to Windows XP Home. Unfortunately, in the process, something in the Windows installer decided to wipe out my existing FAT32 partition (the one where I keep all my data files, mp3s, etc). I’m not sure what happened; I didn’t see any reformatting going on or anything. All I know is that after installing WinXP onto the existing NTFS partition, the FAT32 partition was no more. Both WinXP and Ubuntu reported no partition there. I wondered whether it was just the partition table info that had been wiped, so I reinstated it as before, but the disk is blank. So I will have to restore from backups – what a pain.

And I thought it was bad enough that Windows overwrote the MBR forcing me to rerun grub-install. The partition shenanigans now means that my /etc/fstab is out of date too – some partitions got renumbered. But that shouldn’t be too hard to fix – I think just /dev/sda5 and /dev/sda6 got swapped around. My partition table looks like:

1. 40GB NTFS
2. 2GB ext2 (/boot)
3. 2GB swap
4. Extended partition, containing…
5. 40GB ext3 (/)
6. 200GB FAT32 (shared data)

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