Mike Kershaw wrote:
>> Of course now when I connect my old PATA drive to my new system, it
>> doesn't even recognize it, presumably because the MBR/partition table is
>> total garbage. Fortunately, I have copies of the MBR and each VBR for
>> this drive. Is there any way to copy these back onto my old drive?
> Something like "dd if=backup.sector of=/dev/foo bs=512 count=1" should
> do it.
Thanks! I spent most of yesterday afternoon working on it, and here's
what resulted:
1) BIOS would not recognize PATA drive, formerly "hdb". Took me
several hours to figure out problem was bad PATA cable.
2) Copied MBR, VBR to "hdb" (now "sda") with command given above.
Was able to access partitions, but partitions were empty. I must've
erased everything after copying the files. I remember copying some to
what had been hda.
3) Removed old hdb, connected old hda, copied MBR, VBRs. Mandriva
(my usual distro) hangs with kernel panic at boot. Fortunately, Ubuntu
(also installed) does not, and important files now accessible on old hda.
4) Can now boot Ubuntu and copy files. PATA drive is flaky, and at
each powerup I can only copy a certain amount before drive locks up.
5) Looked through list of files on PATA drive, figured out shortest
list of files/dirs to copy. Will only be able to copy a few files at a
time, but better than nothing. Hope to eventually copy all crucial files.
Adam
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