Removed grub bios partition; Partition table gone

[tantrum]

Ok, I accidentally removed the Grub bios boot partition, after I thought that it was the first and only partition on the second harddisk I have.

Thinking that I could just fix it by remaking the partition, I added a partition 1, with boundaries 1 - 3 MB as set out in the Gentoo installation guide (and as I did before, and installed Grub to /dev/sda with grub2-mkconfig.

But now I can't seem to be able to get the partition table anymore.

It says "Inappropriate ioctl for device"

I'm still booted in the system right now.

It must be possible to solve this without having to install everything, but how?

[fau]

Iirc you need to re-read partition table (or reboot but this can be risky). See "man partprobe".
Also have you tried parted rescue command?

[tantrum]

Hmm, I remade the partition with parted. As far as i know, parted writes partition directly to the partition table when you make them.

I don't remember exactly, but I think that I checked with the 'p' command in parted after remaking the partition, and then it showed /dev/sda1 in the list. Only after I quit parted and started it again, it gave me the ioctl error.

I tried different tools by which you can detect already existing partitions (gpart, partprobe, testdisk), in order to mannually remake the partition table. I also went into parted rescue mode. They either give a 4.7 kB /dev/sda device or give a 'ioctl' error.

My theory: if exactly the same partition, on exactly the same boundaries, with exactly the same filesystem (or none, in the case of the bios_grub partition) is written to the table, as the one which was removed before, then I could just reboot the pc, and it would boot as if nothing had happened. New or old partition table: they would all refer to the same...

[tantrum]

So the computer was rebooted two times in my absence, and no error was reported

Uhm... theory proven?