On Fri, 5 May 2000, Jeff Macdonald wrote:
> Like a bonehead, I did this:
> dd if=loaf1.img of=/dev/hda1
> instead of this:
> dd if=loaf1.img of=/dev/fd0
>
> So I figured I blew the partition table, and maybe just command.com?
Derek's right, you are well and truly screwed. You blew away the partition
table, the media descriptor, the root directory, and the file allocation
tables. (You actually may not have blown away COMMAND.COM, as that file is
not physical location dependent.) The FATs are the really nasty part. You
can reconstruct chains of raw data if you have at least one good FAT, but
otherwise, your file fragments are just so much random bytes... :-(
> Will Norton fix this?
Most likely not. Without a FAT, there is no way to piece together the disk
sectors into chains of data. If you very recently defragmented your drive,
you *might* be able to do sector-by-sector search using DISKEDIT, looking for
magic numbers or known strings in the data files you want, and then dumping
the next X sectors, but that is not exactly an easy procedure.
> Any suggestions? And no, I don't have a backup.
Suggestion: After you have finished re-keying all the data you just lost,
start keeping regular backups.
It always takes a lesson like this to teach us how important backups are.
I still remember a defragmentation utility going haywire on my old 40 MB hard
disk, under MS-DOS 3.3. I lost everything. That taught me that backing up to
360 KB floppy is still less painful then re-entering data.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Net Technologies, Inc. <http://www.ntisys.com>
Voice: (800)905-3049 x18 Fax: (978)499-7839
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