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Fixing the partition table
Indrid Cold
Posts: 16,688 Skive's The Limit
in General Chat
I'll cut right to the chase: Out of pure stupidity I overwrote the first 512 bytes on my hard drive, and that erased the partition table. Does anyone know of a way to bring it back? For example, some program to scan the hard drive, find all the partitions and recreate the table. Or at least some way to extract the data, so that I won't have lost everything.
There was a primary NTFS partition, and an extended one containing another NTFS, two ext3 and a swap.
There was a primary NTFS partition, and an extended one containing another NTFS, two ext3 and a swap.
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If it works for you, do the decent thing and give him a donation.
Otherwise your best bet is probably to use Fixmbr from the recovery console that you can get by booting on to your windows cd.
In reality, you're effin' screwed . I don't want to say it, but my gut says you are... Whilst the first partition will most likely start at cylinder 1, with modern hard drives being so huge you're rather unlikely to work out exactly where the others started and stopped...
Not a situation I'd like to be in. I'm sorry for you mate, I know how frustrating this kind of thing can be!
it probably wouldn't. You'd need to somehow boot linux from a floppy and then rerun your boot loader.
I'm loathed to suggest it, but a DOS bootable floppy with fdisk may be the way to go. You could try an 'fdisk /mbr' command, and cross your fingers - I'm wary, because I don't know how it'll handle NTFS and Linux partitions. But, if you're knackered anyway...
Actually, I've just surprised myself! All you need to do is restore a backup of the MBR and you should be laughing! fFdisk /mbr *should* work, and if it were my hard drive, I'd give it a go. No promises... but in my mind, it'll restore the backup of the MBR and not touch anything else. If it fails, then it'll have only changed the first 512 bytes of the drive - which are scrap, anyway.
I think, at least. I'm very, very tired and I've not done anything like this for a while. Now, I have to go out and port/flow a K series cylinder head. I really don't have the strength at the moment .
Good luck! Let us know how it goes - if it doesn't crack it I'll have a read up later tonight and see if I can come up with any worthwhile suggestions...
Now, I have to figure out what to do with my damn keyboard and my computer will be fine...
We press M.
Would you like me to explain how we use mice as well?
That usually works, but when I want to type a word like "RANT." (notice the . at the end) I'd have to do it like this:
Press R, press A, press N, press N, press N, press N, press N, press N, press T, press ., press ., press ., press. ... You get the idea.
I'm using my old keyboard, because my wireless one just stopped working... and I just changed its batteries!
I remember trying to take a shortcut on a field repair once. I took the keyboard to their airline and dumped 100psi down it, hoping to blow the crud out. It worked superbly - all the muck blew over me. And the keys still played up, so I achieved nothing apart from being miles from home, covered in years of scum. Meh...
About my keyboard... I tried it again after fixing the partition problem, and now it works.
Maybe it deemed someone who does a stupid thing to his disk like that isn't worth working with.