Yesterday I was trying to get SGD running from a pendrive without success. Nothing was wrong with my PC, but I wanted an SGD just in case.

I ended up trying the "Smart BootManager" version 3.7 listed by unetbootin.

From SmartBootManager I selected a given partition and chose "boot it", it asked whether I wanted to save it (sic), I said yes and after that I can't
read my HD.

When booting, I have a grub-rescue> prompt, it knows I have (hd0) but it freezes when I try to look into it. That's all my PC is doing at the moment.

I have booted from a standard Ubuntu Karmic installation USB. I have run:
sudo fdisk -l
sudo apt-get install testdisk
sudo testdisk
sudo apt-get install gpart
sudo gpart /dev/sda

Now fsdisk is reporting "This doesn't look like a partition table Probably you selected the wrong device."

And the starting/ending cylinders reported by fsdisk are different from those reported by testdisk and gpart.

I remember that in the past I had problems after using gparted (not gpart), after resizing a given partition. It was solved by some brute-force
method (like resizing the neighboring partition as well or something like that).

Is this natural to have a +1 cylinder difference between fsdisk and testdisk/gpart ?

What is the most safe way to recover it in this case ?

Thanks!

PS: Logs can be found at ubuntuforums thread 1427150