Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 04:47:30 -0500
From: "Michael R. Wayne" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: mbr issues, partion tables, etc.
I smoked the partition table on my (non Libretto) laptop earlier
today. After a bit of fiddling, I managed to get it back with no
loss of data. Here's a few tools that might help:
g4u - Ghost for Unix. Download one floppy, boot it. It runs NetBSD
(not that you really care) and will ftp a compressed IMAGE
copy of your hard drive to some other machine (that runs an
ftp server and has enought space). Will back and restore up
any O/S, the mbr, any partitions, etc. since it does it at the
sector level of the drive. Can also operate at the partition
level. Take note of the tricks he mentions to reduce your
image size and have a GOOD network.
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
(If you like it, consider sending the poor guy a few bucks).
gpart - partition guesser. Saved me today. Point this thing at
your hard drive with a blown MBR and it may give you a valid
partition table (it did for me). You can edit the partition
table before you write it out (which I needed to do since my
partition #1 comes after partition #2 on the disk). Lets you
enter foreign geometeries and, when run as
gpart diskname
will simply scan and not write anything. Will NOT work under
FreeBSD 5.2 but can repair those disks if you boot under a 4.x
kernel.
http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/76201/gpart/
Someone asked for a simple way to save the MBR. the gpart man page says
this (Note that there as a lot of single floppy boot Linux/Unix disks
out there that you can do this stuff with, even if your native O/S is
windpws:
gpart may be of some help when the primary partition table was lost or
destroyed but it can under no circumstances replace proper disk/parti-
tion table backups. To save the master boot record (MBR) including the
primary partition table to a file type
dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr bs=512 count=1
exchanging /dev/hda with the block device name of the disk in question.
This should be done for all disks in the system. To restore the primary
partition table without overwriting the MBR type
dd if=mbr of=/dev/hda bs=1 count=64 skip=446 seek=446
Warning: make sure that all parameters are typed as shown and that the
disk device is correct. Failing to do so may result in severe filesys-
tem corruption. The saved file should be stored in a safe place like a
floppy disk.
/\/\ \/\/
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