Help with lost MBR on USB HDD

[Jarrod O'Flaherty]

For anyone who might be interested...

> Jarrod O'Flaherty wrote:
> 
> > And last but not least, I really hope someone can tell me how I can
> > salvage my MBR & other 3 partitions. If that is not possible, then
> > perhaps you can point me in the direction of a tool which will
salvage
> > the files on the lost slices? There's not heaps of data there, only
> > around 20 GB or so across all three. But if I can, I'd really like
to
> > get it back. I'm hoping NTFS is robust enough to allow salvaging
like
> > this?
> > 
> > Any and all help GREATLY appreciated!!
> > 
> > Thankyou,
> > Jarrod.
> 
> I know you do not want to hear this, but why on earth did you 
> attempt to mess with the HD without a full backup in place first?
> 
> I am not sure if you can recover the lost data. If not, this would be
a
> good time to wipe the disk clean and partition it to your liking. I
> believe that you will have to install Windows before 
> installing FreeBSD.
> 
> Good Luck!
> -- 
> Gerard
> 

I've done a lot of reading the last couple of days into the MBR and the
like.
Have to say it's a tad tough going, but quite a bit of fun at the same
time. ;)

Gerard, yes, this would be a good opportunity to wipe it and start
again.
If only it wasn't for those MP3s. ;)

For those who couldn't read my last email because it was rather a bit 
too long, the short of it is that FDISK fried my USB HDD's MBR when 
I asked it to change a partition type's from NTFS to FreeBSD.

Why did this happen? 

Does anyone have a large (blank!) USB HDD that they could experiment
with? It would be great to see if this problem is replicable on FreeBSD.

If so, I would suggest that a PR needs to be raised against FDISK.

For anyone in the distant future who perhaps has trouble with their MBR
and/or partitions I've found a stack of great literature on the web I'd
be more 
than happy to post up.

Also, tools that you might be interested in in order to "investigate"
things are:

- dskprobe.exe (WinNT / XP "Support Tool" for hex viewing disk)
- dd  (Data [File] dumping tool in Linux / BSD)
- hd  (Pretty print tool -- used with dd it apparently gets similar
results to Dskprobe.exe)
- gpart  (Partition search and retrieval tool -- not yet tried myself)
- part.exe  (Ranish Partition Manager tool -- runs under DOS)

They would be the main ones thus far. Anyone know of anything else I
should be
checking out?

As it is, now that I am armed to the teeth, I hope to find out how much
damage my 
USB HDD suffered, and then hopefully patch up the MBR and/or Logical
Drives I lost.

Keep you all posted.

Cheers,
Jarrod.