[PLUG] Lost Boot sector and partition table

William A Morita wamorita at hevanet.com
Wed Mar 5 01:52:56 UTC 2008


Mike,

Boy, that was scary.
As you can see from my posting to the group I recovered the data.
The author of testdisk has done a good job.
It even apparently can handle some Vista stuff.

I am transferring the data to a new system.
I will keep more up-to-date copies of boot sectors and sfdisk dumps.
And of course, backups.

- Bill Morita 

wamorita at hevanet.com 
Home: (503) 697-6994
Cell: (503) 260-3876


-----Original Message-----
From: plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org
[mailto:plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Mike Neal
Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2008 10:38 AM
To: wamorita at hevanet.com; General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;civil and
on-topic
Subject: Re: [PLUG] Lost Boot sector and partition table

Hi,

Sometimes gpart can rebuild a damaged partition table:
http://www.linux.com/articles/57748?theme=print

Looking forward to hearing how you fix this, Mike


At 10:03 AM 3/2/2008, you wrote:
>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The files that I had were out of date.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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>PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
>http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>
>
>
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