Hosed my MBR?

[Doug Poland]

On Fri, Apr 14, 2006 at 12:49:50PM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> > 
> > I can still boot FreeBSD off my FastTrack controller (ar0), that's
> > where I'm writing this email from.  I can see both the Intel RAID
> > device (ar1), and mount the data from NTFS (ar1s1), and newly
> > created UFS-2 (ar1s2).  I even did a dd of the MBR from ar0 and ar1
> > and compared the two.  Of course, I don't know what I'm looking at
> > so that didn't go too far :)
> 
> This has lasted long enough that I am forgetting parts, such as it is
> the MS piece that doesn't boot, not the FreeBSD.
> 
> But, if you get a FreeBSD boot loader, then it is not the MBR that is
> hosed, but the boot sector itself.  Probably bsdlabel wrote on it and
> not fdisk.  That could be a little more difficult, since those boot
> sectors can be quite different and are not OS agnostic.
> 
That makes sense.

> In this case, your best bet may be to mount the MS file system from 
> the FreeBSD side and copy it somewhere for safety and then try to 
> rebuild the MS system "from scratch".   Note, I said 'may' be.  If
> someone was to raise an argument, I would fall over easily.
>
A WinXP re-install was always my last resort.  I was hoping for
something quicker.  Data recovery isn't an issue as all my important
data is kept on a file server.  Thanks for your help.

-- 
Regards,
Doug