How to repair partition table?

Question

I have a dual boot computer with Windows 7 and Ubuntu on it. Recently, i was working in Windows7 and my flash had crashed, the computer rebooted to

Error: Partition not found. Grub Rescue>

I had made a Ubuntu Live CD and attempted at fixing it with lilo, I managed to get Grub to work, but I wasn't able to boot up windows.

I went back into Live and did sudo apt-get install syslinux; sudo dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda. I did the same again after rebooting into Windows7 had failed since it was complaining about not being able to load the kernel.

I had done it on sda2 and I reboot to see that it said the OS is missing. now, I did sudo fdisk -lu and I got the following:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe635605c

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               0           0           0    6  FAT16
/dev/sda2   *        2048      206847      102400   de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda3          206848    20686847    10240000    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4        20686848   143566847    61440000    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

I am sure sda1 was not like that...And I can't do cfdisk. It's giving me this error:

FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends before sector 0

Help??

Solution

Use gparted to fix your partition.
sudo apt-get install gparted && sudo gparted

Information about gparted usage you can find here.

Comments

[Aaron]

+1 Good find. The specific area of the document to help the OP is "Task 7: Check & repair filesystem."