On Wed September 8 2004 10:10, J. Rafael S�nchez wrote: > I have a maxtor 250Gb, fat32 that windows xp corrupted ( according to the > tech support at maxtor - this is what windows xp does...Remind me why do we > use windows again...?) Anyway, They say that, according to the installation > manual they "strongly recommend to format these drives immediately as ntfs" > Well, I have purchased close to 20 of these drives in the last year for > many of my users. One of them, I guess, forgot to read the stinking manual. > > Using diskprobe, I've been able to see that the disk configuration > information has been zeroed out. I've been able to put back information > about the starting and ending head, cylinders, and sectors, and even the > system ID. What I don't know how to do is to put back the "Signature, > Starting offset, Partition length, starting sector and partition number. > > Do you know of a good recovery, diagnostic tool that would allow me to > manipulate the disk configuration information?
gpart, a.k.a. "Guess PC-type hard disk partitions" (http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/) is handy for this kind of thing, but as its expanded name implies, not for the faint-of-heart or those in a rush. :-) Theres also parted (http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/) although its not really a recovery tool. Some standard Unix tools (dd, cfdisk, a hex editor, etc.) could come in handy as well. How you piece together and/or create the _exact_ data for a given partition structure is well beyond me, though. Pretty dicey stuff, I would expect (from my readings in the past, it seemed pretty like one would need an in-depth understanding of disk layouts (MBR, etc.) and the filesystem in question). I guess another tool you will probably want/need, then, is Google. :-) HTH, Curtis _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
