Help with lost MBR on USB HDD
Jarrod O'Flaherty
jofsama at yahoo.com
Thu Mar 9 14:29:31 UTC 2006
[Apologies. Posting again with thread header.]
For those who might be interested...
> Message: 26
> Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 13:46:30 -0500
> From: Gerard Seibert <gerard at seibercom.net>
> Subject: Re: Help with lost MBR on USB HDD
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <20060305134300.75D1.GERARD at seibercom.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> 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.
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list