MBR, Partition File recover

[Siegbert Baude]

Hi David,

Josh explained the gpart method perfectly, this tool once did a great 
job for my friend's disk, too. :-)
To make things less complicated in cases of future disaster, just keep a 
printout of your partition table in a safe place.

> Before i do this, is there a way of making a complete copy of the
> drive first? I can store it on another drive in the system. I've been
> going through dd man page, and searching on the net, but have not yet
> found a way of doing.


dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/ad1 bs=128k

To backup your first hard disk to your second hard disk. The second one 
of course must be at least as big as your first one.

Short annotation: bs=128k speeds up backup significantly for IDE disks. 
For SCSI the best value with standard settings is bs=64k IIRC. To be 
sure, search the archives, I'm sure that it was posted by Greg Lehey.

Ciao
Siegbert