Recovering partition table

I got these links from ilugc forum. These two links are for utilities which help in recovering the parition table of the hard disk which may have got damaged / destroyed for any god forsaken reason. I haven't personally tried this. Shall update once (if and no, i dont want such a situation) I try.

gpart - Guess PC-type hard disk partitions
testdisk - file as well as parition table recovery utility

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The Primary parition limitation

I know that we cannot create more than 4 primary partitions. But, why. When technology has grown in leaps and bounds, why this "limitation"? I got the answer to this from ilugc. Any Hard disk drive contains a 448-byte Boot Loader Code (Initial Program Load Code - IPL) followed by a 64-byte partition table. These make up the first 512 bytes of the first track of any HDD. Any OS installation starts from the second track only. Each partition table entry needs 16 byte, thus limitting the total number of partitions to 4.

Synergy between Mac and PC

Can they work together. Can Mac and PC get along well. In Harmony? In Peace? I don't know. But, they sure can share a keyboard and a mouse. "Synergy" achieved this feat. Made my Wintel machine as the server and the MacTel as the client and now, am using a single keyboard and mouse for both the systems. Here's a small write-up on how I got them alive.

First, go to this link and download the corresponding OS related app. Now, since I wanted to use the windows version as the server, I opened "Share this computer's keyboard and mouse (server)'s / Screens & Links" "Configure" button.

In that, I added two screen names in the "Screens" window.
a) Click the "+" button.
b) Add "Joe-Wintel".
c) Here, there is an alias name. If you want, you can give that too. I did'nt.
d) Repeat above 3 steps for "Joe-Mactel" screen name.

Then, in "Links", section, add how the mouse and keyboard is to behave.
a) click the "+" button.
b) My two rules read something like below (Note that the italicized words are configurable)
0 to 100% of the Left of Joe-Wintel goes to 0 to 100% of Joe-Mactel
0 to 100% of the Right of Joe-Mactel goes to 0 to 100% of Joe-Wintel

Click "Start"
Your server is ready.

Now, on to your Mac system.
In the terminal window, go to the synergy app directory. You should see a "synergy.conf" File. Open it.
Modify to something like below.
Point to note. I kept my Mactel to the left of my Wintel. Now, go ahead.

section: screens
   # my Windows system
   Joe-Wintel
end

section: links
   # My Windows is to my (mactel) right
   Joe-Wintel:
       right  = Joe-Wintel
end

section: aliases
   # Where you can map aliases. I have added for your reference only. this is not validated.
   Joe-Wintel
       joe
end

I then went on to create a script to run as client. The command is

sudo ./synergyc --name Joe-Mactel Joe-Wintel &

Now, if you want to run this in the foreground, then use "-f" option. Now, you can create the above as a shell script, and call it from /etc/rc.common file so that the client is up and running the moment the system starts up. ( This way, you can be even more lazy).

And there you have both Mac and Windows living in harmony. The world is returning to peace. Amen.