I just had to blog this, I was that impressed! gpart scans your hard drive for likely partitions, and offers to write the guessed MBR back to the HD. For me it worked first time without any hackery. To say I’m relieved would be a massive understatement!

So if you’ve just lost a partition, give gpart a go. Remember, always make a backup of the HD before doing it (dd if=/dev/xx of=/somewheresafe), and always have a backup system in place for lost data. The most I would have lost would have been emails received since 3.00am this morning.