      This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
      it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
      the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
      (at your option) any later version.

      This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
      but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
      MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
      GNU General Public License for more details.

      You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
      along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
      Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

1. WHAT IS IT ?

Printpar is a program that prints the the partition tables of your disks, including the complete contents of drive tables in an extended partition.

Imagine that your computer some day just displays an error message "Invalid partition table. Insert boot diskette in drive A:, press any key when ready..." instead of booting as normal. What would you do then ?

Hopefully you will never experience this. But if you do, having a partition table printout could be the difference that saves you from loosing important data, because with it you can (either yourself or with help from a PC guru) at least repair the partition and drive tables. Without these tables correct, disk repair programs generally will not work.

But backing up your partition and drive tables may not be your only reason for using this program. It is alway interesting to learn what goes on behind the scenes, so by printing out one copy of your partition and drive tables before and one copy after using fdisk or another partition changing program like Partition Magic or FIPS, you get to learn exactly what those programs do.

For an introduction to how extended/logical partitions are constructed, refer to the file extended.txt.

Also, by knowing how things were initially you will be able to undo the changes that were made by the partition changing program if something went wrong or the result wasn't what you expected.

2. BACKGROUND

There exist several programs are able to display the partition table located in the Master Boot Record (MBR) at the start of the disk, but many of those lack the ability to display the extended partitions. And none of those programs that do handle extended partitions (that I know of) displays absolutely all the data that is needed to reconstruct the partition table and the drive tables from scratch (in case they should be corrupted).

The print command in expert mode in Linux fdisk does a fairly good job by displaying the extended partition table entries that defines the different disk partitions, but in order to recreate a complete extended partition you need some additional information.

Note that this program only gives you the information needed to recreate the partition tables manually. To actually do so you will need a disk editor like Diskedit from Norton Utilities (refer to the section "Programs for editing the partition table" in the file recovery.txt).

3. RUNNING THE PROGRAM

If printpar is run without arguments it defaults to print the partition tables of /dev/hda and /dev/hdb. Refer to the manual for options.

(If you are running dos, windows xx or OS/2 refer to the file README.DOS for instructions on how to run printpar)

4. FEEDBACK

All comments are welcome (including editorial), so don't hesitate to contact me. My email address is either Hakon.Lovdal@ericsson.no or etohaal@eto.ericsson.se. My snail mail address is

	Håkon Løvdal
	Torjus Hansens vei 22B
	4886 Grimstad
	Norway

Alternatively you can contact me through the address of my parents:

	Håkon Løvdal
	c/o Knut Løvdal
	Kile
	4720 Hægeland
	Norway