I recall a while back that the DOS and (I think Windoze) versions had a built-in booby trap to prevent exactly what you propose. When you create a partition entry with fdisk, it would not only write that, but would then go and DELIBERATELY clobber some number of bytes at the beginning of that partition. This was considered some sort of protection - against what, I am not sure.
I don't know if Windoze fdisk still does that, but I bet it does. I don't know what the Linux version of fdisk does, but I would check before I tried it. At least with Linux it would be possible to delete this "feecher" and re-compile. JIm Hartley Chris Knadle wrote: > On Monday 10 December 2007, Adam wrote: >> To migrate files to my new system, I temporarily connected a PATA drive >> from my previous system and copied my files to the new drive. I figured >> I was done with the old drive, and didn't want whoever had it next to be >> able to read my files, so I TOTALLY clobbered the old drive's partition >> table by writing garbage over that sector. Not the coolest move, I now >> realize. Then of course I managed to delete the data that I'd copied >> onto the new drive. I think there is a lesson somewhere in this for all >> of us, especially me. > > They're called backups. :-/ > >> 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? >> Thanks VERY much in advance! > > Long ago I had a similar sort of problem; essentially I had attempted to > use 'dd' to install a loader but had overwritten too many blocks and had > clobbered the partition table. My method of getting the data back was to > re-enter the partition from memory using fdisk. If you made partitions of > the same size (or the same # of blocks) you could use this method. > > As you have backups of the old partition table, Mike's method is most > likely the better choice. > > -- Chris > -- Teen Angel - a ghost story - http://teenangel.netfirms.com _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Dec 5 - Open Source Show and Tell Jan 2 - TBD Feb 6 - DBUS Mar 5 - Setting up a platform-independent home/small office network using Linux
