[PLUG] Lost Boot sector and partition table

[William A Morita]

Carlos

No such luck.
I normally record the entire partitioning using "sfdisk -d".
This one time I was missing current info.
The files that I had were out of date.
If you read up on sfdisk, the "-d" output can be used as input to
reconstruct the partition table.
That includes the extended partitions (> 4)
- Bill 
wamorita at hevanet.com 


-----Original Message-----
From: plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org
[mailto:plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Carlos Konstanski
Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2008 9:41 AM
To: General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;civil and on-topic
Subject: Re: [PLUG] Lost Boot sector and partition table

William A Morita writes:
 > I have a disk in which the boot sector (including the primary partition
> table) was overwritten.
 > All partitions are ext2 and ext3.
 > Does anyone know of any software that can possibly reconstruct the
primary  > partition table?
 >
 > - Bill Morita
 >
 > wamorita at hevanet.com
 >
 >
 >
 >
 > _______________________________________________
 > PLUG mailing list
 > PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
 > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug

I'm no expert in this area, but I'll spout a theory anyway.  If you have a
second hard drive that is identical to the first (i.e. the exact same number
of blocks), you could fdisk it to look just like the way you want the first
disk to look.  Then you could dd the first 512 bytes of the second disk onto
the first.  If I'm not mistaken, the partition table is contained in these
first 512 byes.

Any boot record issues can be fixed afterwards by booting into knoppix and
using grub-install to reinstall the MBR.

Carlos Konstanski
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