can I get my Apple_partition_map partition back?

[bruce]

on Tuesday April 29 2003 Christopher Murtagh wrote:
>  I had a very similar problem to this recently. I went to boot into MacOS
> X (which I hadn't done in quite a while) and got the same
> 'circlewithaslash' that you mentioned. However, I couldn't mount the drive
> with *anything* after that. The only thing I could do at that point is use
> Data Rescue X (which I found on the web) to recover the data on the drive.
> *Major* pain, and Data Rescue X is sorta brain dead - but at least it
> worked.
> 
>  I had assumed that it was a problem with the FWB drivers on that drive, 
> but I'm not sure now. Other info of possible interest is that this machine 
> has two SCSI drives and an IDE drive in it. The installer crashed every 
> time at the disk partitioning part when I had the IDE drive connected. I 
> had to disconnect it to install YDL3.0. After that, I hadn't gone back to 
> MacOS X until this problem came up. Looks like the installer might have 
> hosed my partition map as well.
> 
>  Just out of curiosity, does your drive have FWB drivers on it as well? 
> Maybe this is part of the problem? Or maybe the YDL3.0 bootstrap installer 
> is wonky?

Chris:
The drivers on all three disks (2 SCSI and 1 IDE) were written by Drive
Setup 2.0.7 supplied with MacOs 9.2.  The active driver is located in
partition 2 with name of 'Macintosh' and type of 'Apple_driver43'.

Thanks for your tip of using Data Rescue X I will give it a try and see
if I can salvage at least my movies and music from the IDE drive.  I
just need to find 80G of free space somewhere - yikes!

I have done some more reading about yaboot.  It seems that it has
changed with the advent of OSX.  There is now a restriction that boot
partitions must be allocated before (logically smaller partition id) any
MAC partitions for LILO boot to work. The old yaboot let you put the
boot partition anywhere (I had mine as the last partition of the primary
SCSI disk i.e. partition 8). Maybe the installer was trying to help me
by assuring the boot partition came first.  I just wish the installer
could have picked partition 3 (the backup driver partition) to allocate
the boot partition.

Thanks for your help - I'll let you know if I resolve this without the
use of firearms. 

Regards,
Bruce