[ILUG] Agh! Help!

[Conor Daly]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 10:22:49AM +0100 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Philip Trickett thought:
> Hi,
> 
> Would anyone have any suggestions for the following:
> A user, not really in an awake mode, was trying to create a new network 
> boot floppy for the installation of RedHat 7.3 over a network.  The 
> command used was:
> dd if=bootnet.img of=/dev/hda
> Now, you can see the problem, as the first 1.44 mb of the hard disk was 
> overwritten by the install floppy image, and the computer just does 
> exactly as the install image would do when it is booted.
> 
> It looks as if it took the partition tables with it as well when this 
> happened as fdisk cannot see any partitions.
> 
> Would anyone have any suggestions?  As there was some stuff on the 
> machine which was quite useful.

If you know the *exact* partition boundaries and types, you _may_ be able
to just remake them using fdisk (do NOT! mke2fs them after or you'll
definately lose them!).  If the first partition is something easy (eg
/boot), you might get all your data back from other partitions but you're
not likely to get /dev/hda1 back (IMO that is...)

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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