Minix partition problems

[Xav <MBGE4MDC@fs1.ee.man.ac.uk>]

I really hope someone can help me with this little selection; I use a 
magneto optical drive with my Falcon and ST. On the Falcon it is the 
second drive, on the ST the first - so one of my disks (the ST "boot 
disk") is partitioned into four (C, D, E, F on the ST, G, H, I, J on 
the Falcon). It is also the disk with most of my MiNT stuff on. The 
second two partitions are Minix ones.

Having downloaded the TAF X/Chimera distribution, I had a go at 
installing it on the Falcon. I put it onto the last partition, having 
copied everything to drive I: (i.e. the other Minix partition) just 
in case. I did this using the Thing desktop, so long filenames should 
have been preserved (I presume the usual TOS desktop would have lost 
them).

After some minor teething troubles (my NVRAM was set to boot in 16 
colours) I finally got X working, and everything seemed fine. My 
files were gone from drive J:, but the backup on I: seemed fine.

I also installed AES 4.1 at the same time.

When I came to boot the disk on the ST yesterday (having swapped in a 
different mint.cnf so that it would boot to the desktop) things 
seemed OK. There were lots of error messages at bootup, but I put 
this down to AES4.1, or just some FSCK stuff. There didn't seem to be 
anything fatal going on.

A second attempt to reboot, however, ended in failure to even see the 
partitions - let alone boot from them. I finally got them back by 
using the ICD utils to rewrite the partition headers, and it now 
boots OK. In the process, however, most stuff in the root directories 
(i.e. all my accs, etc.) vanished - but foldered stuff seems OK.

Now the problem. If I boot into MiNT I can read drive F: fine (I'm on 
the ST now, so F: is what was J:) - it doesn't appear as a directory 
in U:, but will appear on the desktop. E: also appears on the desktop 
(but not in U:) but double clicking it causes it to flash (highlight), 
but not open a window. No error is given, however.

I tried re-initialising the Minix info using minit with the -S switch 
to no avail. I also ran fsck, which (apart from claiming that it 
wasn't a minix partition) only gave a couple of map errors - not the 
reams of errors I'd expected.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Also could someone send me the docs 
for minit.ttp (lost somewhere with the accs presumably).

The ST boots fine from other MO disks, so that is not the problem. 
Really I don't know what to try now. I wouldn't mind so much, but I 
had deliberately put all my most important files on I: _for safety_ 
whilst I installed X    :-(

Cheers,

Xav <mbge4mdc@fs1.ee.man.ac.uk>